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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

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Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#51

Post by wolvesechoes »

WD-42 wrote: post #43
wolvesechoes wrote: post #21

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.

You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well. Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.

> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.

I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#52

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Some corporate entity will just take it over and Linux will just be another piece of software constantly trying to figure out ways to rob you.

Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#53

Post by kbolino »

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 matters in the long run for making a good wiki are the people and policies.

Young and niche wikis are happy to take any contributions they can get. The quality and timeliness of any given bit of text soon ends up wildly different from page to page or even section to section. Some people may decide to take their time not just contributing new content but also editing existing content. However, it becomes difficult to balance creation vs. curation. Too much creation, and the editors get overwhelmed, and then the users can never be sure what to trust, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant. Too much curation, and the information becomes uniformly stale and lowest-common-denominator, so the users start going elsewhere, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant.

Different wikis means each one can have its own people and policies. If the people who made one wiki great leave, there are still other wikis out there. If the policies choke the life out of one wiki, there are still other wikis out there. Some wiki can be full of deletionists while another wiki is full of inclusionists. Some wiki can be full of mergers while another wiki is full of splitters.

Forcing everybody onto one wiki forces them all to work together, but this is an entirely volunteer effort, and so many will just leave. Even if they were paid, some individuals would dominate while others would get crowded out. One can point to Wikipedia as a glaring exception, standing as basically the only wiki of note of its kind, but I think it's the exception that proves the rule.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#54

Post by pessimizer »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #51
WD-42 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well. Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.

> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well. I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.

It already insures user freedom, and has for decades. The lecturing is a bad tone. You wouldn't even know this was possible if GNU, Debian, and Linux in general hadn't done it. They shaped your understanding of software.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#55

Post by reedlaw »

I switched from Ubuntu to Arch because of the quality of the Arch wiki. Ubuntu search results were filled with so much misinformation that I realized it was a culture problem. Arch, with its higher barrier to entry, attracts users who maintain its standards.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#56

Post by rdlw »

tempfile wrote: post #41
samgranieri wrote: post #24

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.

Sounds worth reading. Is this the article you mean? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd

That's the systemd article, and this is the forum post explaining why arch moved to systemd: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#57

Post by pessimizer »

noirscape wrote: post #12
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…

In the case of Debian, they have a pretty different stance when it comes to what the role of a distro is compared to Arch. Arch is essentially completely freeform; you, the user, are going to be making a lot of technical decisions on what you want your system to look like. It's perfectly okay for Arch to ship 4 different versions of the same type of tool, as long as all 4 are being used. The Arch wiki reflects this;…

> Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.

But the entire point is how much better Arch's wiki is than anyone else's. I've never run Arch, I've only ever used Arch's wiki to help with Debian. Doing this ironically helps you keep in mind every weird Debianism to figure out how to apply what you're reading.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#58

Post by kelvinjps10 »

slightwinder wrote: post #31
zdragnar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maint…

I think it's more of, let's say, unify the 2 wikis in one, what team should moderate Debian's or Arch's, and which rules should be applied Debian's or Arch's?

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#59

Post by corbet »

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 occasional sharing of subscriber links in this way only does us good. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe and help ensure that there will be more of it!

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#60

Post by pessimizer »

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?

Joining lwn makes you a gatekeeper for lwn (and allows you to browse and comment on lwn), it doesn't simply allow you to be a reader of lwn. I'm sure their traffic has almost no relationship to their number of subscribers. Subscribers are just the people actively marketing the journalism. It's like a two-level pyramid scheme - you're spreading their journalism and looking smart, and 1/500 of the people you send it to become new subscribers.
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