Re: The wiki

On 2026-05-16, Alexis wrote:

> Hi Alan,
>
> Sorry i wasn't able to respond to this thread sooner.
>
> Alan Mackenzie <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Some hours ago, I posted that I had amended that wiki page to
>> correct the
>> deficiencies I had complained about.
>>
>> My changes have since been reverted by somebody called "Ris" in a
>> high-handed and arrogant fashion.  The page is now as bad and
>> misleading
>> as it ever was.
>
> i'm sorry things have gone this way. i've messaged Ris to discuss it.
>
> One contributing factor here is that your edit seems to have an empty
> commit message, without any explanation of your changes. A brief
> explanation of your edit might have helped Ris understand why you made
> it.
>
> i know - and appreciate! - your long-standing work on cc-mode and
> Emacs more generally, but i'm wondering if you also have experience
> editing wikis? And if you do, which wikis? Different wikis can have
> different editing cultures (including commonalities, of course) ....

This one can have a parallel with enwiki in my experience, in that there
may be shortcomings in a commit, but there's the question of whether
reverting instead of starting discussion is a good approach. Doesn't
reach the level of absurd seen in ptwiki where the "solution" to a new
article with shortcomings is *deletion* (and there goes the revision
history)...

In this case, I'd say a possible issue might be commit messages, because
these are not easily amendable.

This being fully web-based on the wiki will always feel, at least to me,
clunkier than the previous approach where discussion could be had in
bugzilla (well, I suppose that's still possible now? I did at least once
file a documentation bug already in the wiki era).

A good thing to have in the toolset for wiki editing are features to go
after old revisions, diff them, copy them to your user namespace. In
fact, if the edits here are not consensual, or create confusion, I
suppose a wiki-ish way to handle it may be to copy the article to the
user namespace and work on it there, linking to [[Special:Diff/...]](1)
in the talk page for the "main" article, or in other discussion venues
(mailing lists, IRC)

(1) In this case, something like
<https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Special:Diff/1440730>, but I mean linking
to a draft in your user namespace. Also, if you do this in your
namespace, you can also later diff between two different articles to see
which changes do you still have to apply to the article in the main
namespace, as MediaWiki has syntax to accept two oldids for diffing, no
matter the article they're from.

(At least I'm assuming this is MediaWiki. Has its looks and behaves like
it, but I didn't check.)

(Also, is it really necessary to hide the page history link behind a JS
menu? I can come up with a CSS override, but it still looks overkill.)

-- 
Nuno Silva