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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

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Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think the sharing is easy

The hard part about sharing is the different syntax of wikis, which could be slightly different even in the same wiki-software. Then there is the organization-part, and the sync-process itself.

Of course, today, 25 years later, we do have better solutions and much more experience for those problems.

> 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?

I would think those are pretty simply, as they all follow the same rules. I mean, handling vandalism isn't much different between Arch or Debian, it's always the same. And moderation really depends on the chosen sharing-mechanism. Which brings up again the hard part, just on a different level.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#32
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

> Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?

How?

> On the other hand, sharing information is easy.

Not in the way we are talking about.

> The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam

No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem.

> don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.

Sharing what? This is about open source? Is this AI-slope? O_o

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

I don't think Arch-Wiki has only one maintainer.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" itsel…

And I thought that free software is about human freedom.

Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#34
post #4
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.

A spike in pages needing updates for the systemd migration which started in 2012 returned to a more normal level. In recent years, NixOS has probably taken some of their enthusiast base too

I switched from Arch to NixOS and I know many others who did too. For users inclined to use a distro such as Arch, NixOS feels like the natural next step.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#35
post #30

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 documentati…

I learned how to do NetBSD kernel hacking from just the man pages. They're still my first-line documentation on the NetBSD file system work I'm doing. The state of Linux documentation is appalling by contrast.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#36

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.

When I was starting with Linux (15 years ago) with Fedora, Ubuntu, etc., for all of my questions I kept finding answers on the Arch wiki. So eventually I just switched to Arch, so the answers would always work.

That was an era when searching the Internet worked. Come to think of it, I haven't had Arch wiki pop up in my search results in years.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#37

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.

That's part of what systemd is supposed to do: make distros irrelevant by providing a uniform software base, after which redundant distros would wither and die, yielding a few main ones which are cross-compatible with one another in terms of how they are configured.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#38
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spike in pages needing updates for the systemd migration which started in 2012 returned to a more normal level. In recent years, NixOS has probably taken some of their enthusiast base too

I switched from Arch to NixOS and I know many others who did too. For users inclined to use a distro such as Arch, NixOS feels like the natural next step.

I’ve had to do very, very little to my Artix desktop since setting it up that I don’t think I’ll ever switch unless my life constraints changed significantly. NixOS seems like a lot to learn. I’m happy to be proven otherwise and know I’m not alone in becoming very complacent to my setup once getting to Arch.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#39

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…

I can't agree more

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#40
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 do…

> Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it? How? > On the other hand, sharing information is easy. Not in the way we are talking about. > The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this…

"Sharing what? This is about open source?"

About sharing information in general.

Wikis work in a open way, if they are niche, to not attract trolls or spam too much, otherwise they work by restricting guest rights, banning ip, etc. Usually pragmatically.

"No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem."

And arch wiki (and wikipedia itself) is a outlier, not the average wiki, that usually is outdated or plain wrong with no one caring.

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