[Nix-dev] Wiki is dead

[zimbatm]

Alright, let me know how I can help.

Personally I am looking forward to much more scoped discussions like how to
improve a specific page.

On Mon, 15 Feb 2016 at 22:30 Rok Garbas <rok at garbas.si> wrote:

> 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 it, but unfortunately there is a lot of bad and/or outdated information,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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> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
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>
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