Hugo Mills wrote: > The quality of a wiki has little to do with the Wiki engine on > which it runs. It is far more to do with having a highly proactive > group of wiki editors, who between them read every single change made > to the wiki, and can make suitable cross-references, indexes, > corrections, updates and so forth to ensure that the content is easy > to find, read and use.
Agreed. Also, people sometimes believe mistakenly that "more is better", as in "if they don't understand this, here's another page that might explain it" - this just makes everything worse and gives the impression of a "stream of consciousness" form of information delivery, that if one somehow soaks up enough, one might understand something. Consider the following page: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Xephyr I don't have any problems with the introduction, but it's rarely the most efficient course of action to list some commands in prose unless there's some kind of educational value involved in doing so: it's easy to accidentally skip commands (either as the author or as the reader) and then find that the desired effect is not obtained. There's some discussion included in the page which should either be included or discarded, depending on whether the comments are valid or helpful, and at the end there's probably the most confusing part of all: a script which is supposed to automate the process (good), but which shouldn't be used because it doesn't work (bad). I'm not even sure whether anyone actually runs a sandbox with Xephyr as the display to emulate the FreeRunner environment, although I know it would be possible as I've done stuff with User Mode Linux and, in my experience, you'd just need the appropriate software in a suitable form for use on the host architecture. Perhaps people just use QEMU or a real device, and perhaps the page referenced doesn't describe something that anyone does - if so, either it needs removing, or someone needs to step up to defend and to document the concept properly. Wiki editors and administrators are important, but the people with technical knowledge have their own responsibilities, not limited to correcting stuff that they've contributed and auditing any subsequent edits. Paul _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community