A Wiki for Gentoo
Colocado por Gustavo Felisberto em Ciência/Tecnologia, Gentoo-dev, tags: Gentoo, wikiA long long time ago I voiced about the need for a wiki in the Gentoo project. In those days Gentoo-Wiki was starting up.
For some reason or other people inside the project felt that having the users producing documentation was a bad idea. For some other reasons that I never understood the gentoo-wiki.com becamed a banned issue, and Gentoo developers were advised not to mention, and not to link to him. I wrote an extensive article about Gentoo on the Efika board that got some raised eyebrows because it was written on the Wiki.
Now Gentoo Wiki has been down for a few days. And according to the backup page it does not seem a fix is going to happen soon.
If we had taken this project under an umbrella a long time ago our users would not be missing on this very important resource.
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I completely agree. I am really surprised that one of the best documentation resources for Gentoo is not part of Gentoo!
I don’t really understand where that fear for wiki’s come from.
The people that i have introduce in gentoo world all this years have actually express their satisfaction from the first days that gentoo has such a good source of information and one of the best wikis out there.
Trying to imagine what is best for a project is good but listening what users actually want and supporting it is better imo
You are absolutely right, Gentoo is about it’s community and not having Gentoo wiki as an official part of the project is a embarrassing.
As a Wiki is a moving target, linking to it from official documentation is a bit shaky. You refer to information in your document that aren’t there anymore, so this can get annoying as the GDP is not able to track such references. Yes, this can happen with every link, but with a Wiki it is more likely (that’s its nature).
So I could agree with having an official wiki but still linking should only be done in very special cases.
Think Web 2.0: it’s all about community, collaborating and users creating new content together. A wiki for Gentoo is a must!
Cheers
Punraz
@Christian, you are mistaking infrastructure support for the permanence of links.
It would seem that unstable hosting is the current primary problem with the existing Gentoo wiki.
While, I understand and even share your concerns about linking, I would like to point out that wikipedia *is* a wiki also.
As Constantine said Gentoo-wiki is one of the best wikis around here and it is very popular here in russia (even among users of other distros) because it has a great bunch of articles. imo gentoo-wiki must become official and receive more obvious domain name (i was always wondering about strange .com in its domain)
Without gentoo-wiki i would probably never start with gentoo, i think it’s definitaly a “must have” in order to get comfortable kickstart and good direction in using gentoo(or any other system)
Comment 6: Not the links, but the information behind it, is what is unstable. And I noticed several times that Gentoo Wiki is badly outdated, simply wrong in a lot of places (so is official documentation, but in less cases). As a guideline it is ok, but I won’t rely on it anymore. No, I don’t have the time to correct all of those articles.
Gentoo-wiki is a great resource and it’s a shame it isn’t supported by the gentoo project. It might not be ideal as an official “manual” but as a general information resource it is great (the How-tos have saved me on numerous occasions).
Not to mention that today we are all stuck with the useless http://packages.gentoo.org. Yes, useless because it still hasn’t search function (after so many months). Yes, of course you can search for a package on console using portage utils, the only problem is that searching on web it’s 10 times faster! Not to mention that to be sure your console search is an “update search” you have to first “emerge –sync”.
Unwise project management is fucking Gentoo, as the time goes on we’re just loosing pieces (see recent problems with kde 4, release cycles, and so on).
@Pinco Pallino: packages.gentoo.org sucks, but packages.larrythecow.org has search…
Thanks, I didn’t know packages.larrythecow.org! But here’s the same problem as with the wiki: why good and useful things like packages.larrythecow.org shouldn’t be under official Gentoo umbrella?!? Why to keep under the umbrella the useless packages.gentoo.org instead?!? Go ask Gentoo “top managers”… Gentoo today looks at me like a headless distribution: everyone going its direction, areas completely uncovered or kept unupdated, and such. Sometimes I ask myself if council members are actually Gentoo users or not: what do they speak about during their meetings? Don’t they see such macroscopic problems?
I completely agree. Gentoo-Wiki should defenatly be supported by gentoo. If there are concerns about it being outdated or having wrong information, just place a notice on top of the page stating that. Although I don’t use it as often as I used to, gentoo-wiki has helped me _A LOT_ in my first days with gentoo, and has proven to be crucial form time to time. I probably wouldn’t be using gentoo now if it weren’t for the wiki.
As far as packages.gentoo.org goes, it’s a complete mess, and it’s shamefull for the distribution. Such a long time and still no search. It looks archaic and provides virtually no service. Someone needs to wake up.
Although I’m not a Gentoo user or any other Gentoo-like GNU/Linux distribution, I’ve been using Gentoo-wiki for about a year. It was one of the first places I looked when I was searching documentation and howtos.
I am using Gentoo-Wiki frequently, and i am really missing that resource.
As far as community-created content goes: with every documentation you have to use your head to ensure you are using the right version (e.g. cryptsetup), so that argument is really bogus, especially since gentoo IS for people that use their heads while maintaining their system.
make it a gentoo project!
@Pinco Pallino: I will try to poke the responsbile persons a bit for the packages.g.o search.
in my experience a ton of ppl who are never using gentoo, know gentoo-wiki.com as a very good source of info.
that tells about its success. i hope its back online soon.
I am using Gentoo for 5 years, gentoo-wiki is the first site where I see for documentation, HOWTOs, etc. I hope it will be back soon.
Anyone willing to help with packages.g.o search:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208376 has a rough patch for it (everything is written in Python).
I still cannot understand why we can not have a wiki moderated by herds, maintainers and the document project. Maybe even recruit some people to help?
The only arguments I have heard against it here is “unstable in content” and I still do not know if that is a “content changes too much” or a “content full of bad advice”, both easily fixed by having a signing function telling the reader if the content have been written or approved since last edit by a herd/maintainer/whatever.
The other argument is “to outdated” but is the official documentation that much better?
If you take a look at the output from openldap it encourage you to read the documentation on http://www.gentoo.org, but if you follow the provided link you get a page about openldap that has a “content outdated” tag. there has been a bug about it for I believe over a year, but still noone have come around to update it.
Xake: The problem is manpower. There aren’t enough developers who want to be involved with the wiki – they’re far too busy dealing with their existing tasks.
I see absolutely no need for the wiki to be official in any way. It won’t improve content. It won’t improve moderation. It would probably make new users consider articles more reliable than they already do (which is a bad thing).
why not just snatch it off wayback machine?
Hi,
couldn’t you report that gentoo-wiki.com is back, but needs a lot of help to recover.
Thanks,
Richard