Making the wiki more accessible to contributors

C

calande

I find it great that the FreeBSD web site has a wiki, however, I would like it to be more end-user oriented.

This is a wiki mainly for FreeBSD developers
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It should be easier for end-users to sign up, to create pages and to format pages. If it were, I bet there would be lots of tutorials and contributions. It would be nice to have a central place for how-tos and for the latest tweaks taken from everywhere on the web :)

A good example is the very good Ubuntu wiki where people contribute all the time.
 
But you don't have a hierarchical structure of tutorials here (ie: Software > Browsers > Plugins), and you can't edit someone else's tutorial :(
 
calande said:
But you don't have a hierarchical structure of tutorials here (ie: Software > Browsers > Plugins), and you can't edit someone else's tutorial :(
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yes, but then again, some spammer can't overwrite my tutorials with some .......t (even if that would be controlled with git and could be reverted)
 
>and you can't edit someone else's tutorial

So what? If you have some improvement post it or send a PM. A forum is usually a great place to discuss something, but it's a very bad idea to gather information in it. Apart from that it would be nice to see a user driven wiki like this one for example: http://wiki.bsdforen.de/ (it's in German). There you can see the difference to a howto-section in a forum at once.
 
oliverh said:
So what? If you have some improvement post it or send a PM.
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Many times, people post a tutorial, monitor it and discuss it with others for a while, then they disappear, and don't respond to personal messages. There's no way to update the tutorial other than asking moderators to bring changes to the content of the tutorial themselves.

oliverh said:
for example: http://wiki.bsdforen.de/
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I like this wiki a lot, it's clean, well organized. This page for instance is a dream come true. We need the same on the official FreeBSD wiki in English.
 
If you want to actively contribute to wiki.freebsd.org you can always ask someone with write access to create an account for you.
 
I think it's great that someone can go out there and build a wiki for freebsd users, and leave the freebsd.org wiki for developers.

The main problem with open, general use wikis is that the noisiest, most irritating people end up running the show. One of the large attractions of freebsd is it's general sanity and the sense of calm reflection, rather than the maddening chatter of the fragmented, and schism-loving linux world.

The wiki concept is very democratic in that whoever can shout down the most people gets the greatest editorial control, which seems to suit it perfectly to the ethos of the linux community.
 
Although I agree with fronclynne, I think a community wiki would be a great idea. This way, people can contribute docs easily, without going through the process of submitting PRs and waiting for someone to commit the changes.

I've sent a few PRs before, and I have to say I had to wait quite a while until they were committed (some still haven't been closed yet).
 
I think that a FreeBSD wiki is a great idea. Especially because a lot of the documentation on this website feels out of date (it's talking about Netscape, floppy disks and Windows 2000).

Btw, I think the Arch Linux wiki is a great example of how a wiki should be. When I was using Arch Linux I found it to be VERY helpful and I really think FreeBSD lacks such a thing.
 
You're welcome :D

But seriously stuff like this in the official FreeBSD handbook is problematic:
If you are creating the floppies on a computer running MS-DOS/Windows, then we provide a tool to do this called fdimage.
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I mean who in the year 2010 are creating flippies on a computer running MS-DOS?
 
paldepind said:
But seriously stuff like this in the official FreeBSD handbook is problematic ...
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FreeBSD is a project consisting of volunteers. The Documentation writers are also volunteers. If you find something that needs to be fixed, like a bug or a typo, submit a bug report or a patch.
 
joel@ said:
FreeBSD is a project consisting of volunteers. The Documentation writers are also volunteers. If you find something that needs to be fixed, like a bug or a typo, submit a bug report or a patch.
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I know, I know. But that doesn't make it less problematic that the documentation looks like something from the 90s. And if it wasn't for the fact that English only is my second language and I therefore isn't very good at it, I would probably have helped in fixing the documentation.
 
paldepind said:
And if it wasn't for the fact that English only is my second language and I therefore isn't very good at it, I would probably have helped in fixing the documentation.
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You don't need to speak English fluently to help fix our documentation. Your English is probably better than mine, and I've been a FreeBSD doc committer for 5 years.
 
joel@ said:
You don't need to speak English fluently to help fix our documentation. Your English is probably better than mine, and I've been a FreeBSD doc committer for 5 years.
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But if I'm not able to write a longer text in English without making grammar and formulating mistakes it would probably be better just to now write any documentation. Anyway, you might be right, maybe I'm good enough. I might try and update some of the documentation and see how it works out.
 
Is unofficial official?

@calande well that's a very trollish way of putting it. We where talking about a user driven wiki, right?

My point was, which has also been implied by others, that the "user commited documentation" by nature can't be official. So why should the foundation provide with such hosting? Nothing is impaired by there being unofficial sources since the Handbook could in time merge any necessary changes. The old Gentoo Wiki was a great example of this!
 
Trollish? Hum... :|

You mean that the FreeBSD can't host a user-driven wiki. That would be sad. Think about the excellent Ubuntu and Arch wikis, their contents are invaluable. FreeBSD hosting them means they are less likely to disappear (think about tutorials that were hosted on BSDForums.org and that disappeared; some of which I wrote myself). Also this makes it easier to find than having to search on the whole Internet jungle. I'm thinking about tutorials such as setting up DVB cards, configuring Flash, font rendering, etc...This can't be updates as regularly on the FreeBSD handbook because it's not as flexible to edit.

"user commited documentation" by nature can't be official
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Why? The handbook content is commited my users, albeit more monitored, and these people belong to FreeBSD. People could submit changes to the wiki, and the same day, FreeBSD members approve the changes. This would be "official".
 
Trollish? Hum... :|
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I see what you mean.. my bad.

FreeBSD hosting them means they are less likely to disappear (think about tutorials that were hosted on BSDForums.org and that disappeared
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Touché, There is another equally good example: The Gentoo Wiki had a crash during the distributions popularity decline and some of the articles were lost forever.

submit changes to the wiki, and the same day, FreeBSD members approve the changes. This would be "official".
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This was exactly my meaning, that extra step of approval makes it not just "user commited".
 
With apologies for choosing an old topic (it's perfectly titled) …

2021:

Beastie7 said:
With all due respect to the project; it really has terrible means of crowdsourcing potential contributors. The Wiki is just embarrassing, as an example.
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Snurg said:
… The Wiki is this way because there is little willingness to accept crowd improving it. …

The group of people getting Wiki editing permission is elitary small, almost only core team. …
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More recently:

Lamia said:
… contents of the wiki.freebsd.org can be difficult to "decipher" as several developers writing articles on similar or related topics. …
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<https://wiki.freebsd.org/Wiki/About> ▶ Create an account

438 contributors, around 22 added in the past year.

To Snurg and any other person who would like to contribute: if you encounter any complication, the FreeBSD documentation channel in Discord might be the best place to speed things along. If you don't have a Discord account, I can say something on your behalf.

(Official #bsddocs in IRC seems to be less responsive.)
 
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