Hi all, Please do CC me if somebody answers this. First of all, Thank you all for your hard work.
Now I am a new guy/newbie who have been trying to use and understand some of the Debian documentation and probably (or not) many webpages in the Wiki seem to have no structure and exhibit some flaws. While there are number or pages where I have seen/feel the problem/s I am taking one wiki page as an example to show what I feel is lacking. All of this is when I'm not logged into the wiki but just as a lurker. I am comparing the structure and the way things vis-a-vis say Wikipedia which might feel unfair to some but I feel it would do everybody a whole deal of good. Also I don't know if things magically get better if I do sign in and feel its always better to see things as how somebody who doesn't know Debian would look at and came into the Wiki looking for things. Please look at the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/BootPerformance . Now this page is not a new page and from what I understand it was one of the original ideas I see several issues with that page (not the content within it though for the moment) as it exhibits some 'failures' as I have seen in other webpages as well. a. Not able to see history :- I do not know if I said this before or not, I would like to see the history as it tells me where it came from and how/where things change. The versioning and diffing of articles is as important if not more than the actual content within the article itself. I tried looking in the more Actions sub-menu if there is/was some option that I missed. I do see a greyed out 'Revert to this version' but that just doesn't make sense. I have seen this happening at almost all the pages. Another example for the same is/would be http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2011 or/and http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Suggested or http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise/InterestingSoftware . I used all of these examples as they have all been changed within the last 24 hours (with the exception of the BootPerformance wiki article) b. No idea about the author and no ways to connect with him :- The idea of having a wiki and the revisions is also able to know who the people who are interested in one thing or the other. If we take the same page http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/BootPerformance one sees at the bottom of the page the name 'PetterReinholdtsen' but unfortunately Mr. Petter Rein holdtsen' or 'Mr. Petter Reinholdtsen' forgot to put up his page. This doesn't tell me if Mr. Petter is a Debian developer/ Maintainer or a user like me. Now of course one could assume just like one assumes in Wikipedia that he is either a very interested party to the cause/article or he knows better as he somehow got the access to write on an immutable page. Of course digging a bit more about him and seeing some of the bugs and digging through them I came to know that he in fact is a developer who is working on that. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=539591 My main/moot point is that for a newbie it isn't easy to know if the Wiki entry has been vetted by a Debian developer or not and how much to trust the content. There should be some way to expose this to users better. c. User-generated content and where/whom to approach :- Now, from what little I know a wiki is a good way to get, publish and share user-generated documentation. Now I do not know where or what is permissable within the Wiki . Now here I'm looking at it a bit like Ubuntu Wiki where the users have also put up some info. about how various packages work. For e.g. I find 'youtube-dl' whose little older is there in the archive a good tool to download youtube videos and as its a command-line program it would be cool to document some of the various options and what happens when you try 'X' or when you try 'Y' and what happened things like these. But I do not know if there are some guidelines published anywhere as to what would be cool but failed to find it. Looking at the help contents just take you to MoinMoin help and not anywhere to ask questions or queries. http://wiki.debian.org/HelpContents d. Lastly, is there some virtual package where I can file these bug-reports (against some virtual package) using reportbug so I'm able to track any or all these issues . There were few more things which I'm failing to recall atm so that it from now. Hope to hear from either of the teams. Thank you for your patience as well. -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com 065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
