Re: [gentoo-dev] An official Gentoo wiki

[Josh Saddler]

Gokdeniz Karadag wrote:
> The wiki can be a staging ground for user contributed documents, which can
> become part of official docs after a review and cleanup by developers.

. . . no, I'd think not.

It takes time and effort to produce one of our polished, professional
documents. That's duplicating the time and effort that it takes to write
a decent wiki article -- pointless duplication.

One of the things I'm hearing from just about every other user and
developer is that users would be providing the peer review necessary to
keep documents at a general level of quality. This means "let the wiki
live its wiki life," which means there's no need to reformat the article
as something else. If it's a decent wiki article, then it should stand
on its own merits....as a wiki article, nothing else. It's a community
contributed article on the community-contributed resource. That's where
it belongs.

Most folks have said they're okay with official Gentoo documentation and
a second community-contributed resource (that may not be as accurate,
tested, readable, etc.) So keep that system around. If you want to jot
up a quick howto, or an article filled with individual speculation and
anecdotes, keep it on the wiki. If you want a doc to be considered *the*
authority on its subject (such as
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xfce-config.xml ;)), maintained by Gentoo
developers, then submit it to the GDP via bugzilla, or provide updates
to one of the docs we already have.

There really is no reason why we can't have this split. There's no need
to XMLify every halfway decent wiki article just because it's so much
better than everything else on the wiki. Trying to do so involves an
inordinate number of work hours and staff that we just don't have, not
to mention greatly raising the existing maintainer burden.