how bout a wiki?

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: how bout a wiki?
started by: undertow

Posted by undertow on Aug. 23 2005,21:13

the forums are great. the community blog is great. the irc community rocks. tis a shame there's no wiki. organization would make some great things possible, and make it even more welcoming to newcomers.

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 23 2005,22:02

My guess is that the biggest hindrance to a WIKI is the lack of somebody to maintain the thing.

Are you volunteering to do this?

Posted by friedgold on Aug. 23 2005,23:13

I think a wiki is a great idea. I agree that there seems to be a great community around DSL and a wiki can only enhance that.

Quote

My guess is that the biggest hindrance to a WIKI is the lack of somebody to maintain the thing.

Do you mean maintain the content or maintain the hosting/wiki software? The whole point of a wiki is anyone can maintain/update the content so I don't see that being a problem. Also if no one wants to setup a wiki server something like wikicities could be used. They provide free wiki hosting as long as the documentation is licenced under the GFDL.

Posted by clacker on Aug. 24 2005,01:20

friedgold, the problem with wikis is that anyone can change them. They act as powerful jerk magnets, drawing in the kind of people who love to delete all of the text on the page you just wrote because they can.

Wikis work best when anyone can change things, but people are contantly watching to change things back when bad people do annoying things.

Posted by undertow on Aug. 24 2005,02:50

There are quite a few people in the DSL crowd, im pretty sure it would be fine. Ive been reading up at wikicities, and there are rollbacks and reverts, as well as page protection in the case of a reocurring jerk.
@cbagger and clacker:
I also believe that the idea of globally-editable pages is to take the pressure off one person to do all the editing and watchdogging. It's a 'get a little give a little' kind of scenario, so it'd have to be a consensus 'yes' before it becomes a good idea.
The possibility of organized information about DSL seems worth it. I believe "swarm-editing" would be easier that you two are thinking.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 24 2005,03:15

patience!

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 24 2005,16:12

To answer the administrator question, the answer is YES.

In other words, somebody has to maintain the infrastructure/application and also somebody needs to maintain or administer the WIKI itself. They are not self maintaining, especially in the area or organizing and establishing a structure to the information layouts.

Posted by undertow on Aug. 25 2005,02:32

I think youre missing my point, or im missing yours. I do not see why "somebody" necessarily has to be only one person.

Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 25 2005,03:09

I'm with undertow here.

Personally I think the blogs are not working out well. it's a good idea, but most posts, particularly recent posts, have been technical questions that would be better served in the forums. The blog software itself is lacking, since it does not handle preformatted text very well...that's something i think is essential for posting commands, scripts, and code. It might not be needed for general blogs, but when its focus is linux you should expect that a lot of what is posted would be code.

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 25 2005,16:31

Don't get me wrong, I like WIKIs and think that they are the correct tool for this job.

However, I don't see a bunch of people here chomping at the bit to do the actual WORK involved.

I'd like to be proven wrong, but so far the only contributions that I have seen are "suggestions".

Posted by nickelplated on Aug. 25 2005,21:48

Mind if I help get the ball rolling?

I submitted a request for creation at Wikicities of the Damn Small Linux Wiki. They'll either accept or deny the request within a week, according to them.
The name I put down was dsl, so if they accept it, it will probably be at < http://dsl.wikicities.com/. >

I also created a scratchpad wiki within Wikicities as a starting point, at this URL:
< http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Dsl:Home >
The scratchpad Wiki is editable by all, so we can get to tweaking things the way we want it right now, provided you guys agree that Wikipcities is where you want the Wiki to be. I put some work into it so we can all get a very general feel for how it would look.

Posted by nickelplated on Aug. 26 2005,00:33

Huh. I just got an email from Wikicities, they told me we can't have dsl.wikicities.com. Here's their response.
Thank you for your Wikicity request. There is already a Linux Wikicity at < http://linux.wikicities.com > which has been fairly inactive, so it would be best to add your documentation of DSL to that wiki. If you need help in learning how to do that, just let me know.

Regards,

Angela

--
Angela Beesley
Wikicities.com

Posted by dare2dreamer on Aug. 26 2005,05:41

Well, i'm not the high and mighty muckity muck of wiki administration, but I'd be willing to lend a hand. Anyone got any ideas as for what sections we'd need?

Off the top of my head:

Hardware Hacks
Install
frugal
to hard drive

Remastering
mydsl
actual remasters

DSL/UCI creation

General Usage Documentation

Cool DSL Tricks to Impress Your Friends

How to get help without sounding like a complete ass.

Supporting the DSL Project
Store
Advocacy and Use Cases

I'm sure there are countless others, but this at least gets the ball rolling. The joy of wiki's is that you can get a skeleton going, and then everyone can add a sentence or two to flesh it out.

Just let me know where to start posting. If wikicities is out, and the main damnsmalllinux.org server can't host it (which is where it should live imho), perhaps someone with some server space can offer up their generosity? I've used dokuwiki in the past under ubuntu/debian servers, and it's fairly light and easy to set up.

Posted by friedgold on Aug. 26 2005,18:08

Quote

Damn. Adding to the Linux wiki doesn't seem to make sense since thats aiming to be reference guide where as we would want things like how-tos, tips and tricks, etc. We might as well add content to the scratchpad wiki for now - it can easily be moved when we get something more permanent. I've added some info on cheatcodes and the DSL boot process.

Quote

Well, i'm not the high and mighty muckity muck of wiki administration, but I'd be willing to lend a hand. Anyone got any ideas as for what sections we'd need?

I was thinking that the documentation could be divided into two sections. One section at users new to DSL with a install guide, basic usage guides etc. One section for advanced users with tip and tricks, infomation on creating extensions, rebuilding DSL, etc. Each section could be subdivided further as more articles are added.

I imagine the layout of the wiki will evolve as more content is added, so I don't think we should spend too much time worrying about the exact layout at first and just concentrate on adding content.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 27 2005,03:37

I told you people to have some patience. >____<

We have had this under development for some time.

It's now live, available to the public at damnsmalllinux.org/wiki

We are not currently looking for SysOps, but if we decide to recruit some, I will make contact via PM or email.

Don't expect it to be soon. ^_^

Make sure to read < THE RULES > and follow them. Also read the Current Events page for news relating to the wiki and the doc project.

I haven't created a "pages wanted" page yet, but consider anything linked on the front page that does not exist yet to be a priority.

-J.P.

Posted by adssse on Aug. 27 2005,04:58

It looks like a very good start, I can only imagine whats to come. I think this will be a big benefit in terms of organizing the massive amounts of information about dsl so that answers are easier to find. Many thanks.

Posted by dare2dreamer on Aug. 27 2005,07:10

The wiki looks great, but how do you add a new page to a category? the way everything is locked down, I can't figure out how to add a new page in a logical manner.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 27 2005,07:34

< Please, read the rules. >

Posted by undertow on Aug. 27 2005,07:54

I also put in a request to wikicities, and received the same response, and went ahead and began a link at
< http://linux.wikicities.com/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux_%28DSL%29 > which has nothing but a few things to test functionality.
...now i see SU has already been working on this a long time.

This page has been locked to prevent editing; there are a number of reasons why this may be so, please see Project:Protected page.

..but really, its not a wiki if we can't add anything.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Aug. 27 2005,19:55

There are very few protected pages.

Basicly the front page, and all the dynamicly created list pages.

The rest is open for you to mess with.

-J.P.

Posted by dare2dreamer on Aug. 27 2005,21:32

Teach me to read documentation at four in the morning. :-)