[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[Rok Garbas]

Hi Zimbatm and Peter,

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:

> Hi Zimbatm,
>
>  > Is the consensus really to kill the wiki or is it just because it's
>  > in a bad state?
>
> I suppose Rok is our local kill-the-wiki champion who can give you the
> authoritative answer to this question, but FWIW my impression was that
> our Wiki is in a rather poor state. Yes, there is useful information in
> it, but unfortunately there is a lot of bad and/or outdated information,
> too, and that mixture seems to do more harm than good.
>
> Now, I don't believe that this kind of chaotic state is a necessary
> trait of wikis per-se. The Arch Linux Wiki, for example, is generally
> considered awesome and it contains a wealth of detailed technical
> information that -- unlike our wiki -- looks extremely polished and well
> maintained. So the underlying problem is clearly not the wiki format.
> The difference between NixOS and Arch Linux seems to be that some Arch
> enthusiast actually enjoy working on the wiki and spent time maintaining
> it, whereas NixOS developers apparently don't do that. Whatever the
> reasons are, the wiki gene appears to be underrepresented in our crowd.
>
> Several people have made various initiatives to help improving the wiki,
> but curiously enough none of those initiatives actually improved the
> *contents*. Nix contributors clearly enjoy making the wiki prettier,
> writing fancy CSS configurations, rendering the stuff in sophisticated
> web development environments from various markup languages, etc., but
> still despite all that effort put into the presentation and management
> of the content, the content itself invariably remains the same.
>
> Therefore, it is my perception that those initiatives will ultimately
> not result in a better wiki because changing the wiki infrastructure
> will not address the problem that we lack people who enjoy working on
> the contents.
>

As Peter already mentioned (and also 2 mailing posts after this) everybody
worries about the tools.
what actually matters is the content and nobody is working on it.

Current wiki content needs to be reviewed page by page and moved into
nixpkgs repository _alongside_ our manual.
That way we can actually start requesting updates to
tutorials/docs/manual/... as part of the pull requests.

Of-course writing all above is easier then doing it.

There are 546 wiki pages and in next days I will look into reviewing them
one by one, and for those I need input I will create a ticket and cc
interested parties to commend where/how should be (re)written.
Once initial review of the pages is done and tickets created, help will be
needed to review and improve the actual content.


-- 
Rok Garbas
http://www.garbas.si
rok at garbas.si
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