On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 14:43:59 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
On 03/03/2012 01:55, Jesse Phillips wrote:
On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 14:49:54 UTC, Robert Rouse wrote:
I'm relatively new to D, so I'm looking at everything I can.
The D
wiki linked from the D site has so much outdated information
and
entries that are more talk pages than actual entries (e.g.
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?ComingFrom/Ruby )
If that wiki is not the best place to go for information
(besides the
newsgroup), what is?
If you do not find the page helpful, please delete it/remove
the
reference to it. The wiki works best when someone is willing to
make it better, and removing useless information is part of
that.
That's a tricky thing to do. While it's easy to add new
information to the wiki, removing it is not as clear-cut: it
requires someone to be able to determine that information is
outdated/incorrect/obsolete, and to be able to correct it (in
case the correction is not as simple as deleting, but rather
fixing some entry). And even so, unless the error in the
information is glaring, people might be reticent to do it, as
it implies "interfering" with someone else's work, and one does
not always know if that is appropriate.
I also generally agree it would be better to have some sort of
process set up around the wiki. Curate it in some way, or have
a more managed, distilled version, that would be of use for
newcomers. Indeed, it seems to me there is an important
separation between some pages, those that are more discussion
like, or more relevant only to experienced/involved members of
the D community, and other pages which are quite important for
beginners (like the Editors page and others linked from
dlang.org), to offer a Getting-Started kind of information.
Responding as someone who used to be much more involved in the D
Wiki (I don't do much anymore due to having less time available),
I think that a new wiki should be set up as a dlang.org
subdomain. We don't have to write the wiki software in D, we
could use a popular existing package (such as MediaWiki, Trac,
GitHub, etc.). I'm sure we could generate a centithread of
discussion about the pros and cons of different wiki software.
The current wiki was generously set up by an individual who
donated server space and wiki software for the D community to use
many years ago, but I don't believe that person would be offended
if we migrated to another system. We should only migrate the most
important pages first (and as we migrate pages, we could indicate
on the old page where the new page is). We'd only migrate pages
that are already largely up-to-date and that we intend to
maintain. The less useful pages would probably never get migrated
to the new site, but the information on those pages may still be
of use to someone on the old site.
As someone who created many of these pages that are now outdated
or obsolete, I'd hate to see them all disappear due to a wave of
deletionism from newer members of the D community who have more
time for deleting than updating.
That's my idea, but I don't have time to implement it myself (I
would be willing to help), but maybe someone else will get
inspired to make something like this happen.
jcc7
