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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

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Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#21

Post by wolvesechoes »

homebrewer wrote: post #7

Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared proj…

What would be even better - just a single, unified distro. Imagine if all those man-hours where actually focused on delivering a single working and polished FOSS OS.

I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#22

Post by tremon »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #21
homebrewer wrote: post #7

Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared proj…

What would be even better - just a single, unified distro. Imagine if all those man-hours where actually focused on delivering a single working and polished FOSS OS. I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.

Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#23

Post by zdragnar »

slightwinder wrote: post #18
homebrewer wrote: post #7

Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared proj…

It probably just never worked out that way. Usually everyone starts with documenting the distro-specific parts first, and then adds more and more, until even general parts are there. But at the same time, everyone probably thinks that those general parts are supposed in the specific projects' documentation, so nobody really cares about sharing. Until the point is reached that some wiki is so big and successful, that…

I think the sharing is easy. The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams? How do disagreements between teams over style and quality dealt with? Cost of hosting split?

All of these are possible to answer, but they are also much easier to deal with when you're not sharing between different organizations.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#24

Post by samgranieri »

I"m still absolutely floored with how good the archwiki is. I can't hype it up enough. I really did't know what I was doing with systemd until I read that wonderful article, and also, the link to why the arch maintainer switched that distro to systemd made my accept the change to it.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#25

Post by Foxboron »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #9
blueflow wrote: post #2

Look at the "ArchWiki active users per month" graph. What happened in 2013? With the exception of the lockdown period, it has been decreasing since then.

Many people used Arch for its status as "the pro Linux distribution" i.e. not beginner friendly, but secretly still easy enough that you don't need much effort. That's how "I use Arch btw" became a meme. These people have now moved to NixOS.

> That's how "I use Arch btw" became a meme.

Not really.

The meme is from 4chan and the /g/ board that had some origins around 2011/2012. Gentoo was the main meme before this.

After 2012'ish the meme-culture from 4chan became mainstream internet culture with the popularity of reddit. Nothing has really progressed beyond that.

> These people have now moved to NixOS.

[citation needed]

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#26

Post by ho_schi »

I shall edit more in the Wiki and post less here.

The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.

PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#27

Post by lukan »

slightwinder wrote: post #18
homebrewer wrote: post #7

Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared proj…

It probably just never worked out that way. Usually everyone starts with documenting the distro-specific parts first, and then adds more and more, until even general parts are there. But at the same time, everyone probably thinks that those general parts are supposed in the specific projects' documentation, so nobody really cares about sharing. Until the point is reached that some wiki is so big and successful, that…

"Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?"

Or ... instead of admitting something, we can also just find a scapegoat instead. Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?

On the other hand, sharing information is easy. The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam, propaganda and advertisers. And companies are quite secretive and don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.

Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.

I have many vague and some concrete ideas since a while about building trust right into the wiki system somehow, but never got around to actually implement something. Because ah well, I have to admit. It really ain't trivial after all, solving human trust.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#29

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

abhijeetpbodas wrote: post #10

For lwn.net articles, aren't these subscriber-only links meant to be used only by the subscriber? Is sharing them on HN sabotaging lwn?

>The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber.

It's literally a feature.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#30

Post by _mlbt »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #17

The Arch wiki is one of the best things the Linux community has produced. It's like a modern, improved and more complete version of TLDP. I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and…

After using FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it is frankly shocking how bad Linux documentation is in comparison. On the BSDs every command, every program, every system call, and every configuration file are thoroughly documented in man pages and other guides. The FreeBSD Handbook in particular is a treasure. It more than makes up for some of the more difficult aspects of the OS by providing thorough and approachable documentation.
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