Wiki status

Question

Greetings, all!
I've been looking for a way to give back to this community (and the GNU/Linux community as a whole) for months now, and recently, find myself with a more flexible schedule. Well, I'm not one who has trouble putting two and two together... This is my chance! But what can I do?
I figured my skills would best be put to use contributing to the ArchWiki, and spent the last few days thoroughly exploring the wiki and related forum posts. It seems a major effort began back in 2006 to dramatically re-structure the wiki, but activity seems to have died off recently, as far as I can tell.
I'm left with a few questions and ideas I'd like to put forth before really "diving in" and getting dirty.
* There was a fair bit of discussion about moving from MediaWiki to another system--is this still in contention?
* Which structure is the wiki aiming for:
a) Monolithic: Massive articles covering everything and everything else about a topic (e.g.: the Beginner's Guide, the Xorg article, etc.)
b) Fragmented: Smaller articles aimed at covering one very specific topic and covering it well (borrowing from the UNIX philosophy)
Personally, I think the 'fragmented' approach leads to a much more maintainable wiki. Furthermore, it tends to reduce duplication of effort (there are probably a dozen different articles all containing information on "configuring pacman," for example).
I think right now the wiki is in need of a "benevolent dictator" to take charge and make some major direction-changing decisions (wiki structure, templates, conventions) before we can really work towards a real "professional"-looking and feeling wiki.
Yes, the alternative argument has merit: "It's a community effort! We should all decide how to shape the wiki, etc." Unfortunately, this decision-making process has been going on nigh three years now. We need definitive action!
I'm willing to volunteer a significant amount of my time towards improving the ArchWiki, but I think the focus needs to shift to the underlying framework first, and enough of this "Just fix up spelling, etc. while we decide how to improve the wiki" nonsense.
Thoughts?
Humbly,
pointone

Answer 1

calm down... I agree, though, the wiki needs another makeover.
I don't think it's a good idea to use the beginners guide as reference. I vote for exclusion of that article from the discussion of
specialized vs. well.. uh the word was monolithic
because it's a guide from start to end about something special (installing and setting up an arch linux system). it should be huge, it should be covering almost everything about almost everything relevant in that stage of the installation/configuration process. It's not helpful for new users if you provide a list of articles which might or might not be exactly what they are looking for (which is an understandable guide for setting something up for the first time)
furthermore specialized does not exclude monolithic. I don't think the xorg article is too long. what would you throw out, pointone? It's about the configuration of Xorg, thus it contains exactly what it claims to contain and only that. the fact that Xorg is a beast to configure changes nothing.
The goal is not to have small articles, but to have articles that cover exactly what they claim to.
as far as i can tell, you, pointone try to suggest a generalized structure with this thread. when you say you want more focused articles, what do you mean. I think we all agree that losing information is not part of a successful restructuration, which means that you need to get all the information about Xorg into smaller articles which are then spread over the wiki (preferably in a category Xorg). How is that helpful? you already have this. the Table of content does exactly this. it just catenates your focused pages and provides links to the relevant section instead of a new page.
I agree though on the fixing the hole before pumping water out
I will see that i can use some of my term break to fix articles in the wiki which are sorely out of date (I noted some of them somewhere, if only i could find my notebook (a real one, like with dead trees in it and stuff )
cheers Barde