[Foundation-l] Re: Wikidoc

Wed Dec 15 15:15:22 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller skrev:

>Jonathan-
>>/ 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.
>/
>I'm not sure I can follow you here. I initiated openfacts.berlios.de for  
>this purpose a while ago, but it never really took off, and I did not put  
>much further effort into it. Today I think that this kind of work should  
>take place on Wikibooks. You can create a portal page specifically for  
>open source documentation, and we'd be glad to set up some convenient  
>redirect there like opensource.wikibooks.org.
>  
>
Sounds great to me, could I get any help or advice on doing this, 
please? I think that this quite well addresses the needs that a free 
software wiki has.

>Of course there are drawbacks: Recent changes will include changes to all  
>books; linking specifically within the context of the open source section  
>will require specifying some kind of namespace or pseudo-namespace, etc.  
>But I believe that the right answer to these problems is to gradually  
>improve the software to better deal with these issues, e.g. by filtering  
>recent changes by namespace, and making certain namespaces "closed", so  
>that any link you create within them points to pages in the same  
>namespace.
>  
>
That is a good point, and does not seem too hard to achieve.

>In other words, I'd rather you outline the needs you think must be met  
>before Wikibooks can become a useful open source portal, than starting a  
>separate project.
>  
>
The wiki is of course supposed to be quite easily navigated, both for 
newbies and more advanced users. Also, the documentation is supposed to 
be on-topic and focused, just like any howto you would find on tldp. 
Unix manuals are also a little special, we have solved that on our wiki 
by using a separate namespace (would that even be possible on wikibooks?).
Internationalization is also important, and is also one of the reasons 
we started our wiki in the first place. There is a lot of Linux 
documentation on the net, but most of it is in english. The need for 
high-quality documentation in other languages is the driving factor here.

    Jonathan