Mailing List Archive

hi

i like the idea even though i'm not part of the doc team .. i'm on the
list for some reason but that fine ;)

maybe we could get some help from gentoo-wiki people and/or 'merge'..

just my 2c (i don't know previous discussions or anything btw so if this
was mentioned before just ignore me ;))
On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
> Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
> wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
> developers and infra overlords.
>
> I know that the GDP discussed this any number of times on this list, and
> some of us (most notably myself and neysx) have discussed it on the
> forums, with occasional feedback from other developers.
>
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
>
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access
> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> 5) ???
> 6) Profit
>
> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?
>
> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
> about Gentoo?
>
> Halcyon has brought it up again on https://bugs.gentoo.org/75855, but
> BEFORE I/we go over there and weigh in, let's hash it out here on our
> list. :)

Josh Saddler wrote:
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?

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.

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.

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 don't see the "classic problems" as problems at all, as long as the
nature of a wiki is taken into account.

> 1) Who has access
Everyone. To restrict this would be a mistake, in my opinion, and
against the open and free nature of a wiki.

> 2) Who reports faulty articles
Wiki users (and mod team)

> 3) Who fixes them
Wiki users (and mod team)

> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
Wiki users (and mod team)

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.

--
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Josh Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
>
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access
> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> 5) ???
> 6) Profit

I think we need to drop the incentive that the documentation on that
wiki is validated by a developer. The moment you work with
community-driven documentation, this is almost impossible to achieve.
In my opinion, the moment we would start a wiki, we use it for what it
is made for: community-driven documentation development.

However, I would use the following practices:

- Specific documentation that is "dangerous" to execute should have a
big red warning block, telling the users that this is not common
practice, is dangerous to execute, might result in yielding support
from developers, yada-yada. Examples of such topics could be
bootstrapping, editing portage code, specific C(XX)FLAGS, ...
- Translations of documentation are free to perform and should not be
reigned by rules such as "must be based upon a revision of the English
documentation". This does assume that the topic in the wiki is
self-explanatory.
- Wiki information pertaining to ~arch stuff should be in a different
namespace or some other way of destinguishing them (if not, even a tag
would help) that informs people that ~arch ebuilds are not tested
enough and can contain bugs

As manpower is important with wiki's (think of spam regulation), it
would be nice if we could tie forum accounts to wiki accounts, and
edits on the wiki are only allowed with accounts (no anonymous
editing). The moment a spammer occurs, account deletion should result
in some practice where all his/her edits are checked (I believe this
also occurs on forums, but I'm not sure).

Note that I'm not suggesting that forum admins should work on wiki's
too - if they want to, that's great, but it's a different playground
and I wouldn't want to push them into responsibilities they didn't ask
for ;-)

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.

--
FreeB(eer)S(ex)D(rugs) are the real daemons

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
> > So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.

How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Goran Mekić wrote:
>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> refine them and move them to official docs.

. . . no. There's zero point in doing all the work twice (original
article and then XMLifying it.) Especially since now you have twice the
maintenance burden, and it IS harder to maintain XML docs than wiki
articles.

Seeing how many users are weeping for gentoo-wiki.com's content (its
database was lost) I'm sure that gentoo must have own wiki.

В Втр, 11/11/2008 в 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler пишет:
> it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?

I think wiki should never be associated with GDP project. It's a
separate entity - it's primary goal is to provide a single place where
our users could share solutions for their problems. Yes it may help GDP
project - users and/or developers could write initial proposal there and
when document will be considered good GDP will convert it to guidexml
and publish it. But until document is on wiki GDP has no responsibility
for content published there.

> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access

Everybody.

> 2) Who reports faulty articles
> 3) Who fixes them
> 4) Who verifies the article is correct

It's wiki: if article faulty and user wishes to improve he/she fixes it.
Mods are required to help to solve technical conflicts between users and
to remove spam. Also they could help to organize content...

--
Peter.

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.

Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> hi
>
> i like the idea even though i'm not part of the doc team .. i'm on the
> list for some reason but that fine ;)
>
> maybe we could get some help from gentoo-wiki people and/or 'merge'..
>
> just my 2c (i don't know previous discussions or anything btw so if this
> was mentioned before just ignore me ;))

Yeah, it has. You may wanna search our archives or the Gentoo forums for
posts by me on the subject. :)

In short, a merge won't happen, as the gentoo-wiki owner has stated he's
not interested in us hosting the site. More on that in another email in
this thread.

Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
>>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>> If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
>> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
>> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
>> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
>> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
>
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

No idea. That would depend on whatever wiki system is actually
installed, I imagine. And I haven't heard from Infra what they'd be
willing to install.

> . . . no. There's zero point in doing all the work twice (original
> article and then XMLifying it.) Especially since now you have twice the
> maintenance burden, and it IS harder to maintain XML docs than wiki
> articles.
I've never gave it a thought, but it looks logical. That being said,
is GDP ever going to switch to wiki, if wiki prooves it self as good
enough? Anyone can se few (dis)advantages of this, of course, but is
it even considered as an option?

--
FreeB(eer)S(ex)D(rugs) are the real daemons

Josh Saddler wrote:
> 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).

Did he do that after the recent debacle? I think he would be more
interested now. (Yes, people can change their mind...)

I don't think it would be worthwhile to start a competing wiki and
divide the userbase.

>> 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.

Well, then it is a case of educating the ignorant, I'd say.

> 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.

>> 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.

So in essence you are against an open wiki, that can be freely edited by
users. In that case you're turning a wiki into just a different backend
for the official documentation project. There may be merit in that, but
it is a completely different project, and not a wiki as commonly
understood. And not something I am particularly interested in.

--
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> I think we need to drop the incentive that the documentation on that
> wiki is validated by a developer. The moment you work with
> community-driven documentation, this is almost impossible to achieve.
> In my opinion, the moment we would start a wiki, we use it for what it
> is made for: community-driven documentation development.

Exactly.

> However, I would use the following practices:
>
> - Specific documentation that is "dangerous" to execute should have a
> big red warning block, telling the users that this is not common
> practice, is dangerous to execute, might result in yielding support
> from developers, yada-yada. Examples of such topics could be
> bootstrapping, editing portage code, specific C(XX)FLAGS, ...

Yes, I agree there should be indications of quality, possible danger,
bleeding-edgeness and so on. As I already said, something similar to
Wikipedia would work here, I think.

--
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (lxde, media, desktop-misc)
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering PR liaison
__________________________________________________

yngwin@gentoo.org
http://ben.liveforge.org/
irc://chat.freenode.net/#gentoo-media
irc://irc.oftc.net/#lxde
__________________________________________________

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:12:03AM +0100, Ben de Groot wrote:

> > 1) Who has access
> Everyone. To restrict this would be a mistake, in my opinion, and
> against the open and free nature of a wiki.
>
> > 2) Who reports faulty articles
> Wiki users (and mod team)
>
> > 3) Who fixes them
> Wiki users (and mod team)
>
> > 4) Who verifies the article is correct
> Wiki users (and mod team)
>
> 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.

I agree. I think that most users expect Gentoo to host a really opened
wiki. This doesn't mean Gentoo has to guarantee its content.

--
Nicolas Sebrecht

Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> posted 491988F5.9010206@gentoo.org,
excerpted below, on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:30:29 +0100:

> Josh Saddler wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Did he do that after the recent debacle? I think he would be more
> interested now. (Yes, people can change their mind...)

I'm wondering on that too. Events sometimes have a way of changing
someone's mind, and if that could happen, I'd think it would have at this.

The one remaining issue I could see him being concerned about would be
that "government by committee" would ruin its effectiveness, and that
content wars and the like would eventually turn it into a hopeless mess
as a result. I think it's worth noting who already has quite some
experience in the area -- he does -- and NOT taking it out of his hands
if we do decide to host it. Perhaps some adjustment, but he had a useful
thing going, why not let him continue with it. (More after the points
below.)

> I don't think it would be worthwhile to start a competing wiki and
> divide the userbase.

Decent point.

>>> 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[.] If users see a wiki on gentoo.org, it seems more like
>> it counts as "official, verified" information.

> Well, then it is a case of educating the ignorant, I'd say.
>
>> And really, I don't know that I trust the users, given what
>> gentoo-wiki.com has turned into.
>
>>> 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.

> So in essence you are against an open wiki, that can be freely edited by
> users. In that case you're turning a wiki into just a different backend
> for the official documentation project.

Personally, I strongly support the open wiki idea in general and see no
reason why it couldn't be on an official Gentoo domain even as such, but
I believe there's more that can be done to mitigate possible problems.

* That "shooting ourself in the foot" comment was, I intuitively thought,
headed somewhere other than it went. What I would have suggested there
would be a HEADER, not a FOOTER (thus, the footer suggestion is shooting
ourselves in the "footer", was where I expected that to go :). Make it a
single paragraph at the top of every page, demarced similar to the way
IMPORTANT notes are demarced in the "official" docs, if necessary linking
to a longer disclaimer page.

* Something I've seen on both the xorg and wikipedia wikis is "locked
pages". If a particular topic appears vital enough yet continually gets
abuse that needs tended to, set it up as desired and lock it, with a
pointer to the "talk" page or etc for further suggestions. Similarly,
now dated info could be locked with an "outdated, here for historical
purposes, see <link>" disclaimer.

* Also quite effective on wikipedia are their various preformatted
"original research", "written like a commercial" etc disclaimers,
appropriately boxed and bolded so it's very difficult to miss them. The
preceding point already mentioned a couple of uses for such Gentooised
preformatted disclaimers, and there are surely others.

Of course, the guy who was running the unofficial wiki will certainly
have a lot of wisdom borne of hard experience in this area, and likely
already has reasonable solutions of his own. It'd be nice to fit the
preformatted elements into the existing Gentoo theme, but there may be
limits on fitting that into his style, both page and admin.

* The above confluence of interests does therefore suggest one possible
general solution. Basically, set it up with a Gentoo frame, including
that disclaimer header (or footer) I mentioned, on Gentoo hosting, but
otherwise give him (and the users) reasonably wide latitude, with the
agreement structured so Gentoo can do what's necessary to protect its
interests legally, of course (DMCA, copyright and libel takedown and the
like, for instance). Of course, cover dispute and termination as well.
The simplest way to do this may be to make him staff, much like the
global forum mods, but with both parties getting rights to the existing
wiki content should there be a split, so neither could hold the other
fully hostage.

(Obligatory disclosure: I've very occasionally browsed the wiki as I
came across google links or etc in the past, but it hasn't been regular
by any means. However, I've certainly missed it lately as I recently got
an Acer Aspire One, and a lot of the Google links to info (accurate or
not) on Atom CFLAGS and the like are now dead, as they pointed to gentoo-
wiki. =:^( I've ended up having to be satisfied with the Arch-Linux
forum thread on it and the like, but even that points to gentoo-wiki!
But I really haven't had time to do much with it yet anyway, so it hasn't
been a big issue... yet. Still, it's a big hole in specifically Gentoo
friendly info I'd otherwise have, and I've become acutely aware of how
many non-Gentoo users depend on the "unofficial" gentoo-wiki, whatever
problems it may or may not have with accuracy. We really do need either
it or a replacement up with /reliable/ hosting.)

--
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

Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
> > > So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> > If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
> > wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
> > see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
> > refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
> > administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
>
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Shouldn't be a (big) problem, Wikipedia uses such a feature where
longtime users/mods/$whoever can mark a page as verified.

That being said: We need wiki.g.o.

If it's easily doable do connect forums and wiki accounts/logins - i'd
like that as well :)

Tobias

--
Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution
http://www.mitp.de/5941
http://www.metadistribution.eu

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

Josh Saddler wrote:
> Hey again. So there's some discussion (again) on starting up an official
> Gentoo wiki. Official meaning it's hosted on our infrastructure; e.g.
> wiki.gentoo.org. This time the discussion is coming from our fellow
> developers and infra overlords.

If infra is willing to host it, why not, as long as they keep *all* the fun to
themselves.
Don't expect GDP to be involved.

> I know that the GDP discussed this any number of times on this list, and
> some of us (most notably myself and neysx) have discussed it on the
> forums, with occasional feedback from other developers.
>
> However, it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
> issues?
>
> The classic problems are:
> 1) Who has access

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 2) Who reports faulty articles

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 3) Who fixes them

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 4) Who verifies the article is correct

Anyone, it's a wiki

> 5) ???

me too.

> 6) Profit

Plenty of wor^Wfun for volunteers.

> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
> not? If so, for once, does anyone have some *sane* ways to admin and
> moderate such a wiki?

Just let it live its wiki life.

Please let's make sure it is 'officially *hosted*' and it clearly states its
content is user-driven and not sanctioned in any way by Gentoo.

Use a license that would allow some content to be reused in our docs, you
never know, maybe some articles might be worth it.
gentoo-wiki.com used to use GFDL license (Public Domain was also mentioned, so
no one knows what license people thought they were contributing under).
When pointed out to that fact, they blanket relicensed everything under Public
Domain. Now they use CC-BY-NC-SA. How would we credit everyone if any article
was to be reused?

> There's no question that having a properly-administered wiki can be a
> powerful asset. Look at Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, the Xfce wiki, etc. What
> about Gentoo?
>
> Halcyon has brought it up again on https://bugs.gentoo.org/75855, but
> BEFORE I/we go over there and weigh in, let's hash it out here on our
> list. :)

Actually, there's no reason it should be discussed here. Take it to the forums
where the audience is more important. wiki.gentoo.org would be a user-driven
resource, just like the forums are, and I think many users would like the idea.

My $0.0251120


Wkr,
--
/ Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/

Peter Volkov wrote:
> Seeing how many users are weeping for gentoo-wiki.com's content (its
> database was lost) I'm sure that gentoo must have own wiki.

Its DB, not its content.

> В Втр, 11/11/2008 в 01:16 -0800, Josh Saddler пишет:
>> it's been quite awhile since the last time we (the GDP) talked
>> it over. Given our current issues of manpower and time (see
>> archives.gentoo.org for commit totals), perhaps a wiki could solve some
>> issues?
>
> I think wiki should never be associated with GDP project. It's a

Agreed, this discussion should be happening here.


Wkr,
--
/ Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/

Thomas Raschbacher (Gentoo) wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:41 +0100, Goran Mekić wrote:
>>> So, I'd like to hear what you think. Should we have a wiki? Why or why
>> If you try to simplify things (suppose there's no spam, no obuse),
>> wiki could be a great pool of potetial official documentation. As I
>> see it, this is the greates value of wiki. "Just" pick good articles,
>> refine them and move them to official docs. As a person who never
>> administrated wiki, I have no clue how to secure it.
>
> How practical/possible is it to add some kind of 'verified by a
> developer / moderator' flag / tag which cannot be changed by normal
> users and only applies to a specific version of the page?

Simply impossible.
Sure you can have some 'officially sanctioned' tag on articles, but how do you
garantee it keeps this status.
Anytime anything changes in the article (easy to detect) or anywhere else in
GentooLand and the content can become very wrong.

Let users "vote" on articles, comment on them, provide feedback, and obviously
edit content... Let the wiki live its wiki life.

Wkr,
--
/ Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/
/\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/

В Втр, 11/11/2008 в 17:08 +0000, Duncan пишет:
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> posted 491988F5.9010206@gentoo.org,
> excerpted below, on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:30:29 +0100:
> > Josh Saddler wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > Did he do that after the recent debacle? I think he would be more
> > interested now. (Yes, people can change their mind...)
>
> I'm wondering on that too. Events sometimes have a way of changing
> someone's mind, and if that could happen, I'd think it would have at this.

This was after. I've tried to contact him too and afaik there was an
official proposal at the same time with similar results.

> > I don't think it would be worthwhile to start a competing wiki and
> > divide the userbase.
>
> Decent point.

But still we need our own wiki at Gentoo infrastructure.

--
Peter.

Goran Mekić wrote:
> That being said, is GDP ever going to switch to wiki, if wiki prooves
> it self as good enough?

Please ask again when the wiki will have run properly for at least six
months.

Cheers,
-jkt

--
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth

Xavier Neys wrote:
> Just let it live its wiki life.
>
> Please let's make sure it is 'officially *hosted*' and it clearly states its
> content is user-driven and not sanctioned in any way by Gentoo.

Xavier, thanks for your input; it's appreciated. Your proposal makes
sense, but I think it's actually untenable in the long run.

We're going to see what we already have now: a conflict between the wiki
and the "official" documentation.

"Well, the wiki says this, but the official docs say this."
"Which do I follow?"
"Well, the official docs are wrong/out-of-date, just do the wiki, even
though it's harder to follow." Etc.

This is why I feel having a wiki really *is* relevant to the GDP. We'll
be running into the problem we have now, which is essentially a fork in
our documentation, whether that documentation is primarily contributed
by users or developers.

Also, if we do have a wiki, why shouldn't the *GDP* embrace it in some
way? My reasoning here is that we have so little contribution from
*anyone* these days, users or developers. Yes, Gentoo is known for its
accurate, in-depth official documentation, but it's also known for the
wealth of user-contributed articles. I think there will be problems on
down the road if we continue to keep the two completely separate; we're
seeing this even now. There may be some merit in attempting to merge
these disparate documentation bases. Maybe it could be a way to increase
participation from the community.

> Use a license that would allow some content to be reused in our docs, you
> never know, maybe some articles might be worth it.
> gentoo-wiki.com used to use GFDL license (Public Domain was also mentioned, so
> no one knows what license people thought they were contributing under).
> When pointed out to that fact, they blanket relicensed everything under Public
> Domain. Now they use CC-BY-NC-SA. How would we credit everyone if any article
> was to be reused?

Yup, licensing is important; at least Gentoo would control the license
from the start, since as you say gentoo-wiki.com blanket relicensed
content many times over the years.

Disclaimer: I'm not a dev

Just a few thoughts before this gets thrown out into the wild. Some people
have been saying that a wiki on the gentoo domain would confuse users and
make them think it was somehow sanctioned information. If you've spent any
time in #gentoo in the last month or so, you know that almost everyone
thought gentoo-wiki.com was controlled by gentoo (including myself). So that
would actually be less confusing for most users. Also, everyone pretty much
understands the point of a wiki.

Also, I always liked the idea of GLEP 51 (gentoo knowledge base). The idea
of having some kind of a dev stamp of approval on high-quality wiki
articles, as suggested above, would serve the same purpose. I think it would
be a great way to increase the number of doc submissions. Users and devs who
submitted wiki articles could increase the quality over time, request a
review, and try to get a "This article is part of the Gentoo Knowledge Base"
stamp on it. Just an idea...

Lastly, considering the GDP's reputation for quality docs, I would love if
you were in charge of the wiki. If you're short on manpower, I'm a competent
(enough) user who would love to be part of this new wiki project if it goes
through. Give me a shout next time I'm in #gentoo-doc (djanderson).

-Doug

Hi all,

First of all, for those of you who don't know, I'm an admin on the new
Gentoo-Wiki.com and was a long time contributor before that on the old
wiki. Having said that, while the wiki did occasionally go down, a loss
like the one that happened will be less likely to happen again as a
proper offsite backup policy is now in place.

While I would be pleased to see a wiki hosted on official resources as
Gentoo probably have far more resources at their disposal than any user
run site could hope to acquire.

However, in saying that I would be concerned about an officially hosted
wiki from what I've read so far.

It's been suggested that the wiki be moderated by forum mods. I believe
that a separate team would be needed. Administering the wiki takes at
least an hour a day (estimate, once it's at "full steam" - it's been
quiet recently due to the down time, but it's slowly getting busier),
and that's without considering extra work into tidying up articles -
making sure they are properly formatted and they don't contain any
obvious errors or bad practices.

There's also been no discussion on how foreign languages would be
handled. The new wiki has more supported languages than before - the
current list (from the topic of #gentoo-wiki on EFNet) is:
en,cs,de,es,fi,fr,nl,ru,tr

You also need to think about the style in which articles on the wiki
should be written and the templates used. What will policies be on
creation of new templates? What will the page naming conventions be?

While a true wiki is open to editing by all, and you may opt to protect
certain articles (because you deem them to be "official" or whatever),
you will still need admins who will handle spam, page deletions and user
restrictions. You will obviously want admins for each language you
support. Who will they be and what will the recruitment process be? Will
they get any training?

If you intend to create a wiki to replace gentoo-wiki.com, how will you
handle this? If the wikis end up running side-by-side, will you have
policies on copying from gentoo-wiki.com? (You should probably have
policies on copying from other wikis anyway)

There are probably some other topics I've missed above, but as you can
see there's a lot that I believe needs to be discussed but hasn't been
at all. Everyone's saying "yes" for an official wiki, but how much
thought is going into how it would actually work?

AllenJB