[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Gentoo Wiki Project

[Duncan]

Patrick Nagel posted on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:42:40 +0800 as excerpted:

> On 2010-04-08 19:51 UTC Ryan Hill wrote:
>>
>> why are we setting up a user wiki when a very popular one already
>> exists? it seems like a complete duplication of effort.  i'm not saying
>> don't do it, i'm just baffled why we would.
>
> Well, one reason could be, that the "unofficial" one lost its whole
> database once, and there were other multiple multi-day outages in the
> past. I expect an official Wiki to have a reasonable availability and
> not losing most of the content, breaking links all over the net for
> months.

In addition to that, various invitations have been and I expect will 
continue to be made, to the guy running the current wiki.  For whatever 
reason(s), he doesn't seem particularly interested in running an official 
Gentoo wiki.

In some ways I can't say I blame him.  There's a lot of politics that goes 
into anything Gentoo-official, and it's perfectly sane for someone to love 
Gentoo but have no interest whatsoever in jumping thru all those political 
hoops he'd ultimately have to jump thru, or being the political pawn the 
wiki could likely be if it's as popular and useful as people hope.

Likewise, Gentoo's uncomfortable officially linking to something they 
don't control in any way, shape, or form (except to the extent that we 
could arguably pull his domain name for trademark reasons, if things got 
ugly enough, tho that'd be incredibly bad for EVERYONE, so nobody wants to 
go there!).

Regardless of how justified or not those reasons are, they exist, and are 
a practical barrier to the current wiki and owner becoming the official 
one.  Yet the feeling is, and I as a Gentoo power user agree, we need a 
wiki that we can officially point to, a place for documentation that 
hasn't made it thru the formal Gentoo-doc and GuideXML process, and may in 
fact never rise to that level, but is still valuable.

Also, there's the licensing issue.  The current wiki has a non-commercial 
clause for its content licensing that doesn't seem appropriate for an 
official Gentoo wiki.  And no one except the individual content 
contributors can change that, so practically speaking, a new wiki without 
that clause is needed.  Individual contributors can copy their own content 
over, of course, and other content can be rewritten, but the content 
cannot be wholesale transferred, nor will it be.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman