Re: [gentoo-doc] Wiki, Take #whatever

[Josh Saddler]

Ben de Groot wrote:
> I for one, am very much for a an officially Gentoo-hosted wiki. The
> unofficial wiki has been a very valuable resource, even with its
> shortcomings. I think we should bring it on board and offer the security
> of our infra resources.

Nope. The gentoo-wiki.com owner has already stated on the forums that he
doesn't see a need for it to be hosted on our infrastructure. More to
the point, he told our infra guys this when we offered him a box (he got
a better overpowered offer elsewhere).

> I am of the opinion that we should see the wiki more or less as we do
> the forums. It is a place where users can contribute to the Gentoo
> community. I would expect most of our users are internet-savvy enough to
> understand the nature of a wiki as user-generated and user-editable
> content, and therefore not being as reliable as say our official
> documentation.

Unfortunately, they do *not* understand this. Just look around the
forums. Users are greatly surprised when wiki or forums tutorials break
their boxes, then get busy pointing fingers and wondering why no one's
updated the article. Or they notice that no one really knows; there's
not a "solution" as such for their issue.

If users see a wiki on gentoo.org, it seems more like it counts as
"official, verified" information. Maybe the smarter ones  recognize that
like the forums, it's limited and unofficial, but by and large we
*cannot* depend on users understanding this.

I think Ubuntu tackles the issue a bit differently -- there seems to be
somewhat of a distinction between official-ish wiki/wiki articles and
community articles. At least the basic stuff, like About, Installation,
Desktops, etc. seems to be more or less
Canonical-written/approved/official. Just try searching around to see
where the differences start to creep in. Though their wiki sucks for
searching and returning coherent results.

> We could form a team of moderators (from both user and developer base)
> that would do some quality control, similar to what happens on
> Wikipedia. They could indicate articles of particular value and quality,
> as well as indicate if there are issues (outdated, incorrect,
> incomplete, etc) with specific articles.

I suppose there would have to be flags/tags similar to wikipedia's "Out
of date/needs review", with some sort of way of notifying
admins/mods/devs/whoever about it.

>(and mod team)

Who is this mod team, really? I've seen some proposals for forum mods,
but none of them have expressed any interest in it; they've enough work
as it is. The ebuild devs aren't so interested in it; they're not
interested in docs of any kind, and they've enough work as it is doing
ebuilds. Basically, the developer pool is out.

And really, I don't know that I trust the users, given what
gentoo-wiki.com has turned into. We've seen how far most the users can
go, and it's not enough.

Infra has only said that they are willing to host one, and administer
the server hardware itself. Spam and day-to-day article maintenance
would not be performed by infra.

> We could add a disclaimer to the footer along the lines of: this wiki is
> open and free for everyone to edit, therefore Gentoo cannot guarantee
> the accuracy of its content.
>

That's shooting ourself in the foot right there. Personally, I don't see
the point of a resource that cannot be verified nor vetted for
correctness. In my view, documentation simply must be accurate,
otherwise we are doing ourselves and our users a disservice.