[Nix-dev] Regarding the Wiki

[Jonathan Glines]

2016-01-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Profpatsch <mail at profpatsch.de>:
> We have basically decided to shut it down soon (™), right?
>
> Just now I tried to set up my printer again.
> For that I first looked at docs and the source, which didn’t
> provide any helpful info, and then I found the article on generating
> the correct Cups files here: https://nixos.org/wiki/Printers
>
> If we dissolved the wiki, we would need to tranfer all that knowledge.
> But should we all pack it into nixos-help?

This is the first time I've heard this; I missed the thread where they
decided to shut it down.

It's somehow difficult to defend the wiki. It has a lot of dated
information, some misinformation, and not enough editors. But the
wiki's articles are mostly orthogonal to the official documentation.
There's no way we can replace the wiki with official documentation.
Here's what I mean:

1. When I started using NixOS, the manual mostly confused me. I
Googled for "example nixos configurations" and wound up on the "Real
World NixOS Dotfiles" on the wiki. That's a page that would never fit
in the official NixOS documentation. A year later, someone (not me I
swear) added my nixrc to that wiki page, and now I have over a dozen
stars on my GitHub repository. Wow. Those people are crazy for
thinking I know how to write configuration files, but I'm sure the
examples on that wiki page help to inspire them like they did me.

2. The "Raspberry PI" article does not belong in the NixOS
documentation until /after/ the Raspi build is working. But if nobody
documents the progress, how will curious people experiment with it and
get Raspi working? Scrape the mailing list? Scroll through the feature
request on GitHub? Unlikely. It's a catch 22 problem without a wiki.

3. Random people documenting how they set up their laptop's weird
hardware. Sure, some people have blogs. But not all of us have the
time to maintain a blog. A wiki is a good place for those people to
contribute.

4. Does anyone remember when Gentoo's wiki crashed, and the fallout
effect it had on that community? I know our wiki is much smaller and
probably not that significant, but if the NixOS userbase does grow,
where will those users turn to? (Probably the Arch Wiki TBH)

Incidentally, I contributed to the printer article you mentioned. I
still don't know (after a year of using NixOS) how one would go about
contributing to the official documentation. I feel it would be a shame
for future NixOS users to lose that easy means to contribute. If new
users are reluctant to contribute to the wiki, why should we expect
them to contribute to the official documentation?

The maintainers of the wiki are making a huge mistake trying to shut
it down. The wiki as it is now is a tiny seed that reflects how small
the NixOS community is right now. We should help it grow, probably by
pruning the ugly bits (even linking them to the official docs). Please
don't kill it.

I'm really sorry for the rant...