[wiki][proposal] Rewrite of the "Router" wiki entry

Question

This is a proposal to establish rewrite and restructure the entire "Router" wiki article located at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NAT … connection (The wiki entry "Router" currently redirects here).
There has been much discussion of a rewrite in the #archlinux irc channel and a small number of users, including myself, wish to heavily rewrite and reorganize the information located at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NAT … connection and http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NAT … d_features.
The current articles, while informative, are extremely lengthy and provide large amounts of unnecessary information when creating an Arch Linux router. Some of the steps provided in the entries above are hard to follow, are provided out of order, and require you to unnecessarily browse off-site links for one or two lines of additional text to be added to a configuration file instead of providing them for you. This can be very confusing or misleading to someone not familiar with setting up this type of system.
The rewritten entries would be divided into the following wiki entries - Router: Basic (redirected from "Router"), Router: Advanced.
The rewritten entries would contain similar information to the original entries, however with some sections removed, reorganized or relocated and easier to follow. This would be able to ensure accessibility and usability of the Router entry for novice users, and at the same time allow more advanced users to additionally tweak their router.
Due to the large amount of information provided by both existing entries, a third "Draft" entry would be proposed - Router: Draft.
This would be a public wiki entry where those who wish to contribute to the rewrite of these articles can join and provide feedback to the existing status of the rewrite project. This would allow the information currently present on the existing pages to still be usable while the rewrite is taking place. Once the draft has been deemed usable enough to replace the existing entries, the draft page will be removed and the existing entries will be replaced by the newly rewritten router entries.
Note: It came to my attention that it may just be wiser creating the Router: Basic and Router: Advanced pages and doing the rewrite on each respective page instead. During the time of the rewrite, an "article in progress" notice can be displayed informing users that the article itself may not be ready and should be followed at their own risk. As it stands, Router: Draft will be unnecessary.
Those of us who are adament about rewriting these entries are curious to hear the community response to this proposal. We are going to begin rewriting the entries very soon and would like others to contribute or review our works on a regular basis. Please let us know what you think, as we would like to hear the community suggestions and insight on this proposal.
Last edited by roadmap (2009-04-14 10:36:42)

Answer 1

u_no_hu wrote:
@roadmap..
Nice work guys...
One suggestion... dont include unnecessary(ie details available on other parts of wiki) details...
IMO you can nuke this whole part without any loss of content because anybody who is going to install arch on a router will already be familiar with pacman and upgrading etc.
On a default installation, Arch Linux does not come with what you will need to configure an Arch Linux router. You will need to install some additional packages to make Arch Linux function how we intend to. For this task, we will be using the package manager pacman.
Tip: If you want more information on pacman and its uses, please see the Pacman wiki page
[edit] Upgrading Your Packages
If you have not done so already, you should go ahead and update your installation to the latest packages. You can do this by running the following command from the command line.
pacman -Syu
Allow it to proceed and once it has finished, continue to the next part of this tutorial.
This is just my opinion and people may differ, but i find lot of wiki pages (xorg/beginners guide to mention two) to be bloated with excess info instead of linking to relevant part of wiki.
I have thought about your inquiry and my response is hard to put it in perspective. I do agree with your philosophy about the fact that the specific section is unnecessary. However, those who may be attempting to setup an Arch Router may not have any internet access, outside of the Arch Router machine itself,  at the time they are following the tutorial.
You have to remember that this is a tutorial/howto, and a good tutorial should contain all information necessary to complete the desired task. If someone should desire more information about a particular application or have a differing situation to the one that the tutorial is trying to achieve, then linking them to more information about each application may provide additional help to their situation.
That was one of my complaints with the previous Router entry: it would send you off site to find one or two lines of config that could have just very well been included into the original article. It expected you to have full internet access while telling you flat out to tear apart your network in the process, and by doing so destroyed parts of its usability.
With that being said, you have to remember that the current state of Router: Basic is incomplete and if anything a "draft". Once its complete, it will probably end up going through a few more revisions to ensure all the information provided is correct and necessary. You are more than welcome to add your own changes and information to it. The more help and input the better the article will be. So if you do feel like that section should be removed, feel free to change it at your leisure.