[Foundation-l] Wikidoc

Sun Dec 5 14:44:05 UTC 2004

Hello, fellow Wikimedians!

Since this is my first post to this mailing list, please let me
introduce myself. My name is Jonathan Fors and I am chairman for the
Västerås LUG, located 100 km west of Stockholm, Sweden. I am a full-time
Linux user and an occasional Wikipedia contributor, and I am a big fan
of Wikis in general.

In our LUG, which has existed for little less than a year, we have
started an ambitious Wiki project using Mediawiki. Its purpose is not
only to collect information about, but also to be a complete Swedish
Free Software documentation resource. We have and are translating
HOWTOs, manpages, tips and write documentation about all files and
directories of the *NIX system. Basically, it aims to be a complete
guide to GNU/Linux, *BSD and Free Software.

Now, the last week, some of our contributors have told us that they feel
like duplicating the Wikipedia project, something that I cannot fully
agree to. Wikipedia is encyclopedic and documentation isn't, meaning
that it not really fits there. I know about Wikibooks, but the whole
concept of a "single place for GNU/Linux and Free Software
documentation" would be a little far off. But not to cooperate with the
Wikimedia foundation would be to waste a big resource of knowledge and
knowledgeable people. So therefore, I have an idea.

There are, as far as I can see, a few subprojects under the Wikimedia
umbrella. Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks are a few examples. They
contain different types of, often non-encyclopedic information that
don't fall under the same category as Wikipedia. The project most
similar to our Wiki is probably Wikibooks, which contains, guess what,
books! Well, not only books, but manuals in general. This is although
not ideal for the users that our Wiki aims to serve with information. 

So here is the idea, feel free to flame or comment about it. I propose a
new subproject, perhaps called "Wikidoc", that documents 1. GNU/Linux
(including all distributions) 2. The various flavours of Free operating
systems 3. Free software in general (including those running on Windows,
web-based CM systems and so on). 
Information (the sort you could find in an encyclopedia) goes to
Wikipedia and is linked from Wikidoc. Longer, in-depth books are linked
from Wikibooks, and source code and historical Usenet announcements
could be linked from wikisource. Wikimedia has IMHO a good opportunity
to create a Wiki for Free software, and much of the infrastructure is
already present.  

Okay, I bet you have some things to crack down onto this on. 
First, why do this under Wikimedia when there is wiki.linuxquestions.org
and the BerliOS Wiki that does the "same thing"?
Well, this thing would not be able to use the Wikimedia projects very
well. The great resources would effectively not be usable and also, the
user base is much smaller than Wikipedia's.

What has this got to do with Wikimedia at all?
In my opinion, the Free Software documentation would be something that
would attract a lot of new users, in a lot of languages. The reason we
started our Swedish project was that we felt that there was very little
high-quality documentation for GNU/Linux written in Swedish, and the
little that was was very scattered across the Internet. This was the
situation for the Swedish GNU/Linux movement back then, something that
now has changed with the advent of a few GNU/Linux-oriented Wikis.

I hope to receive feedback on this idea, and in the meantime you can
visit the Wiki at http://vlug.linux.se/wiki (Swedish)

Yours Sincerely,
Jonathan Fors
Chairman, Västerås Linux User Group
http://vlug.linux.se/