Re: Debian Wiki Experiment

Hi Thomas,

On Sat Feb 8, 2025 at 8:12 PM GMT, Thomas Lange wrote:
> Maybe people can mark the pages they think are of good quality.

That's a good idea, there's precedent in Wikipedia and similar 
communities, and it's something we can codify Today.

> Why do most people say they look at the archlinux wiki when searching
> for information? 

I honestly don't have a solid answer for that question but I think it 
deserves to be explored thoroughly. In my case, the value I've got from 
pages on the Arch wiki have tended to be relatively long pages and 
"opinionated". Looking at my browser history, for example, there's 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xterm>, which:

 * doesn't just repeat content from xterm's own documentation
 * is somewhat specialised to the audience
         ("On Arch Linux, xterm sends ^H key when backspace"…)
 * tackles "modern" concerns like UTF-8, modern expected behaviours for 
   this class of app (visible scrollbars, alt and backspace etc behaving 
   as expected);
 * is technically precise (e.g. "xterm's default font is the bitmap font 
   named by the X Logical Font Description alias fixed, often resolving 
   to"…: doesn't just name whatever the most likely static font is, 
   links off to a page describing Logical Font Description in more 
   detail, specifically details that 'fixed' is an alias…)

Other good examples from my history are 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/User> and 
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration>

Visible on all of these are meta-notes and discussions (admonitions for 
sections e.g. "This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or 
style improvements. See Help:Style for reference."; links to individual 
Discussion ("Talk") pages for debates on particular articles).

Crucially, I think, there's a community and consensus operating *on* the 
wiki. Our style has been to push meta-discussions away from the Debian 
Wiki and to debian-www@ (see e.g. the stern warnings on 
<https://wiki.debian.org/DiscussionTemplate>); I've never been in favour 
of this and frankly I think time has shown that this hasn't worked.

> The ratio of good to bad pages on must be improved
> can I think this can only be done by deleting the bad ones. OR better
> start from scratch.
>
> If we do no risk to delete pages, we will never get a better wiki.

 On this particular point, I think there's room to "agree to disagree", 
 but only because, whether one is "deletionist" or not, I hope we can 
 agree that removing bad content *alone* is not sufficient: we need to 
 identify (or write) good content, too.

You may be happy to know that this year a few editors (inc. me) have 
instigated some large-scale deletions. I didn't note the page count 
before/after starting but a cursory glance at 
https://wiki.debian.org/RecentChanges should show LOTS of *deleted*.
(not sure who "zeha" is but, thank you, whoever you are!)


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👱🏻    Jonathan Dowland
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🔗      https://jmtd.net