Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> writes:
What does the team think can be done about it?
i'm not a Gentoo dev, merely someone who (a) has Strong Opinions about the need for good documentation, and (b) has contributed significantly to various FOSS docs, most recently the Gentoo wiki[a].
First and foremost, it's important to remember that, unlike some other distros (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu), Gentoo isn't backed by a corporation; the overwhelming majority of work is done by volunteers, who contribute if and when they can. This means that, even if people agree that a particular thing would be Good To Have, it's unlikely to happen unless there are people willing to commit to doing the work - and, critically, to maintaining it in an ongoing way. There's nothing compelling people to work on particular things. The wiki is no exception. i think it's fair to say that those of us who've regularly worked on the wiki are keenly aware of all the areas that need improvement, and of the fact that there's much more work that needs to be done than there are volunteers willing to take on the work.
Secondly, the wiki runs on MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia, so that provides some constraints on what's able to be done, or at least how easily something is able to be done. Something might be _possible_ to do, but require more work than people are willing to do. Or it might not. It can vary.
Thirdly, there are some aspects of presentation that are subjective enough that they lead to substantial bikeshedding if people's differing and reasonable preferences aren't taken into consideration. For example, there are many people who prefer dark themes, and have Strong Opinions about being forced to deal with light themes. i very much prefer light themes myself, and get cranky when forced to try to read Web sites that insist on dark themes - particularly when they're low-contrast, which is increasingly problematic for my aging eyes - so i can relate to people placed in the opposite situation. What that means is that design changes can't be assumed to be happening in _only_ a light theme context, or a dark theme context. Nor can it be assumed that the wiki will always be viewed on a desktop device, rather e.g. a phone - indeed, people might be using their phone to access the wiki because they've broken their desktop system and are trying to work out how to fix it. :-)
Finally, i'd like to suggest that you open an issue on bugs.gentoo.org, under the "Websites" -> "Wiki" component, with your thoughts and suggestions, because that's much more likely to be seen by the relevant people:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Websites Alexis. [a] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Flexibeast
