This is an attempt to summarize active discussion about the future of Debian Wiki.
- concerns about maintainability of moin1/python2 (sysadmin side)
- feature requests
- content metadata (tracking licensing, DFSG-compliance)
- content concerns
- out of date content
- quality of content
- concerns about lack of contribution
- theory: moinmoin is off putting
- theory: moinmoin IP block scheme is too much
- how is this specific to moinmoin? is the hypothesis that other engines have more sophisticated anti-spam functionality?
yes. MoinMoin has a single lever that blocks both editing and reading. So many folks (apparently particularly Brazil) are blocked from even reading the content as a consequence of blocking spammers. -- jmtd
I'm not one to defend moin, but https://moinmo.in/HelpOnAccessControlLists says "Using ACL's, you can easily configure the wiki so that anonymous users can only read, but not edit pages." -- sez
- how is this specific to moinmoin? is the hypothesis that other engines have more sophisticated anti-spam functionality?
- theory: the wiki lacks a strong culture of change reviews to maintain high quality (see archlinux comment below)
- theory: the wiki lacks structure and its purpose/objectives/audience are not clear
- theory: new contributors would benefit from guidance on what contributions would be welcome
the freebsd wiki has a guidelines page that is directly linked from the wiki landing page that, among other things says: All pages, including new pages, should always be 'complete', even in their initial version. Place drafts or "pages-in-progress" under your AccountName/ namespace until they are ready for prime time. Attempt and prefer to obtain content review before landing new pages in the main namespace.
the archlinux wiki also has guidelines directly linked from the wiki landing page, and they are very thorough; it explains the fundamental rules and warns that Any edits to articles that do not respect these fundamental rules, and as such cannot be comprehended with reasonable effort, may be completely reverted without any other warnings, especially when affecting popular articles.; the page also encourages subscribing to updates for pages one owns, links to the list of currently active wiki maintainers
by contrast, wiki.d.o has a "we need your contributions link" which leads to ?/DebianWiki, which has an assortment of links, among which the most relevant to content guidance are:
- "Content Criteria" (/DebianWiki/Content) which has 4 brief bullet points with very generic guidelines ("content should be useful/usable!")
DebianWiki/EditorGuide, which is an assortment of guidance on formatting, technical concerns, how to organize the wiki, and writing style
- the list of wiki content admins (currently only one person) is at DebianWiki/Contact but I'm not sure how I got there
- theory: less is more
- wiki.archlinux has ~2.5k pages (in english) compared to Debian's ~25k (across all languages, but I'd bet that the vast majority are in english)
wiki.archlinux has an easily discoverable list of eight active wiki maintainers (a role which they describe as "formal") in a page that was last updated one month ago, compared to one active content maintainer in /DebianWiki/Contact (last updated >2y ago).
- theory: debian's culture of strong personal ownership discourages contributions to "someone else's" page
archlinux page count based on output of: lynx -dump 'https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Table_of_contents' | egrep '^ *.*\([0-9]+\)' | grep -v 'also in' | sed -e 's/.*(//' -e 's/)$//' | awk 'BEGIN {s=0}; {s=s+$1}; END {print s}'
Active discussions:
Page Copyright |
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License |
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Authors |
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see DebianWiki/LicencingTerms for info about wiki content copyright.