Re: The old wiki.netbsd.se

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2016, Jan Danielsson wrote:
> There was a thread about this a long while back, I believe the argument 
> was that it would be better for the community to have one authoritative 
> wiki so all useful information could be centrally managed.

Ah, okay. I seem to remember some talk about it, but I think it was before 
I was on as many of the ML's as I am nowadays.

> I also seem to recall that there were some voices saying that the 
> official NetBSD wiki broke the spirit of a wiki

Well, like you, I can see both sides of that argument. Oh, and also, thank 
you for responding and taking the time to catch me up.

> -- but in the end some consensus was reached.  If you search around in 
> the mailing list archives I'm sure you'll be able to find the thread I'm 
> referring to.

Yes, I think I did find it after some digging, thanks. I also found this 
page:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/asau/

"What happened to wiki.NetBSD.SE Simply put, it was shut down.
Stop complaining. Just stop. Better help saving useful information."

I guess there was a bit of drama around the discussion. He sounds a bit 
miffed. Sorry for going over old ground. I never got into the original 
discussion and I'm not going to get all butthurt about it.

The deal is that I have some infrastructure at home and a domain etc... 
Hosting anything useful for NetBSD sounds like something I'd like, but I 
don't want to get involved with TNF politics either by re-creating a site 
that some folks deemed harmful or by trying to rule-follow my way through 
contributing to the official wiki.

>   I can see both sides of the argument (having a de facto standard 
> unofficial wiki vs not having one); I had some experience with "the" 
> Gentoo unofficial wiki which I think is illustrative:

That does indeed sound like a rough time. Sorry that happened to you. As a 
value-system thing, I guess it's a judgment call between the 
impact/danger of getting and using bad unofficial information versus the 
not having the useful bits available at all.

> (couldn't get any gcc to run, which in Gentoo is bad..).

Heh, yeah, that would be. As in, "no new portage software for you - ever."

> I asked on IRC if it was a known issues and was told that one should 
> *never*, under any circumstances, "update world", and that following 
> some random unofficial wiki was a recipe for disaster.

It's a rather extreme example, but valid nonetheless.

> I'm thinking that's *exactly* the kind of scenario TNF wants to avoid by 
> not having a de facto standard wiki which is unofficial.

Hmm, okay. Then I think the best way for me to proceed would be that if I 
do decide to create another NetBSD documentation resource, I'll be very 
clear that it's unofficial, completely detached and unrelated from TNF, 
and that all information is subject to being wrong as heck.

> No you're not the only one, I liked it and I know others who did -- but 
> it's a little more complicated than that.

Well, thanks again for your time and the explanation.

"... But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the 
horror was that he might also be wrong." George Orwell, 1984

-Swift