On 01/04/18 10:38, Marko Cupać wrote: > Feel free to contribute to [!WARNING - BLATANT SELF PROMOTION BELOW!] > > [https://www.mimar.rs/blog/tag:openbsd] > > As a side note, setting up apache and grav [https://getgrav.org/] took > me an hour or so. Writing simple article takes whole day, sometimes > much more.
bingo. I love wikis for internal documentation. But the magic is not setting up the wiki (or anything else for documenting), it's MAINTAINING it and getting others to participate. Sadly, as is proven almost daily on this list, even though it is trivial to put crap on a website, people seem to get this idea that if it is "found on the web, it must be true!". People don't trust google with their personal data, but if it shows up in a google search, it must be "vetted" some how! It must be good! No. Of course not. And yet ... As has been demonstrated in comments on this thread and in practice, people tend to write stuff, toss it out on the 'net, and forget about it. This is a problem. For something like Wikipedia, facts don't usually change as much as they do get added to. For an OS, things actually change. What is written today and is correct becomes WRONG next week. So everything out there has to be periodically scrubbed for accuracy. And that creates a problem -- what if the maintainers don't actually know everything about everything, and the original author wanders off and isn't responsive? The obvious answer is delete the old article ... but what if you don't even know if it needs update? (maybe the answer is auto-removing every document that is not updated once a year) Could it work? Yes. But not because of a discussion on misc@, but because of a lot of people choose to make it happen. And then, there's the problem of getting groups of people to agree on things. For example, I looked at the first article on the mimar blog here, and I disagree with the basic structure. Too much duplication of installation instructions, too much "do this", too little "here's why I'm doing this". There's some really great things in there, like the -P command to populate the MFS file systems, without even commenting about that nifty command people might not know about. And then you have a bunch of echos used to create a script. boo. Just provide the script and say "copy/paste this into your editor", or better, "here's how I did it", and assume if someone needs to be told to copy/paste into their editor, they shouldn't. Don't obscure the actual details with "echo ... >>file" crap. Now, if I'm on the administration team, do you 1) think I'm an idiot and storm off? 2) make the changes I suggest and decide this isn't fun and then wander off? 3) decide I'm brilliant and start writing the "Nick Way"? (hint: it won't be #3. In this case, hopefully, it would be #4: kick me off the administration team, since it's YOUR server, not mine! :) ) Bonus points for actually doing it, though. Nick.
