On 15/05/2025 15:52, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
FYI, some of us have recently re-started an effort to improve the Debian
Wiki. One of the things we need to establish (IMHO) is to determine what
audience the wiki is *for*. For example, it serves a useful function for
Developers, with clusters of pages for Debconfs, summers of code, etc.,
and well-maintained pages for some developer tools.
I would say that wiki may be useful for categories: developers and
users. However sometimes it is confusing to whom a specific article is
addressed and it is disappointing. It adds uncertainly what page should
be used to add a piece of info.
It's less clear how useful the current wiki is for users. I think many
of us are inspired by how good the Arch Wiki is for users, and the
Debian wiki falls far short of that. I guess we should try to improve it
for users, but we don't have consensus on exactly how to do that, yet.
Do not try to compete with Arch wiki. In the case of Debian, significant
part of wisdom is put into package scripts and most of users just do not
need it. However it is indispensable for debugging.
Another part of Arch wiki is info missed in upstream docs. It is up to
users to contribute to Arch or to Debian wikis or to their own blogs. I
do not think, additional actions are necessary to share efforts. Thanks
to search engines and LLMs resources are effectively merged.
There are docs specific to Debian that are not suitable for upstream or
other distributions. Some of info is available from README.Debian and
NEWS.Debian files. I suggest to make them easily available from Debian
web sites, e.g. direct links from packages.debian.org. Debian wiki may
be the primary source for points missed in README.Debian.
From my point of view, the main issue with Debian wiki is that there
are no enough contributors to convert obsolete info into historical one
that helps users who were not used some app for a period of time and
need to refresh their knowledge.
By the way, MoinMoin was dropped from Debian repositories. Is it an
obstacle for running wiki.debian.org?
P.S. HTML markup and CSS may be more friendly to smartphones.
