On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 14:43:59 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 03/03/2012 01:55, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 14:49:54 UTC, Robert Rouse wrote:
>>> I'm relatively new to D, so I'm looking at everything I can. The D
>>> wiki linked from the D site has so much outdated information and
>>> entries that are more talk pages than actual entries (e.g.
>>> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?ComingFrom/Ruby )
>>>
>>> If that wiki is not the best place to go for information (besides the
>>> newsgroup), what is?
>>
>> If you do not find the page helpful, please delete it/remove the
>> reference to it. The wiki works best when someone is willing to
>> make it better, and removing useless information is part of that.
>
> That's a tricky thing to do. While it's easy to add new information to the wiki, removing it is not as clear-cut: it requires someone to be able to determine that information is outdated/incorrect/obsolete, and to be able to correct it (in case the correction is not as simple as deleting, but rather fixing some entry). And even so, unless the error in the information is glaring, people might be reticent to do it, as it implies "interfering" with someone else's work, and one does not always know if that is appropriate.
>
> I also generally agree it would be better to have some sort of process set up around the wiki. Curate it in some way, or have a more managed, distilled version, that would be of use for newcomers. Indeed, it seems to me there is an important separation between some pages, those that are more discussion like, or more relevant only to experienced/involved members of the D community, and other pages which are quite important for beginners (like the Editors page and others linked from dlang.org), to offer a Getting-Started kind of information.

Responding as someone who used to be much more involved in the D Wiki (I don't do much anymore due to having less time available), I think that a new wiki should be set up as a dlang.org subdomain. We don't have to write the wiki software in D, we could use a popular existing package (such as MediaWiki, Trac, GitHub, etc.). I'm sure we could generate a centithread of discussion about the pros and cons of different wiki software.

The current wiki was generously set up by an individual who donated server space and wiki software for the D community to use many years ago, but I don't believe that person would be offended if we migrated to another system. We should only migrate the most important pages first (and as we migrate pages, we could indicate on the old page where the new page is). We'd only migrate pages that are already largely up-to-date and that we intend to maintain. The less useful pages would probably never get migrated to the new site, but the information on those pages may still be of use to someone on the old site.

As someone who created many of these pages that are now outdated or obsolete, I'd hate to see them all disappear due to a wave of deletionism from newer members of the D community who have more time for deleting than updating.

That's my idea, but I don't have time to implement it myself (I would be willing to help), but maybe someone else will get inspired to make something like this happen.

jcc7

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Justin C Calvarese <jccalvarese+d@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 14:43:59 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>
>> On 03/03/2012 01:55, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>>
>>> On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 14:49:54 UTC, Robert Rouse wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm relatively new to D, so I'm looking at everything I can. The D
>>>> wiki linked from the D site has so much outdated information and
>>>> entries that are more talk pages than actual entries (e.g.
>>>> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/**wiki.cgi?ComingFrom/Ruby<http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?ComingFrom/Ruby>)
>>>>
>>>> If that wiki is not the best place to go for information (besides the
>>>> newsgroup), what is?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If you do not find the page helpful, please delete it/remove the reference to it. The wiki works best when someone is willing to make it better, and removing useless information is part of that.
>>>
>>
>> That's a tricky thing to do. While it's easy to add new information to the wiki, removing it is not as clear-cut: it requires someone to be able to determine that information is outdated/incorrect/obsolete, and to be able to correct it (in case the correction is not as simple as deleting, but rather fixing some entry). And even so, unless the error in the information is glaring, people might be reticent to do it, as it implies "interfering" with someone else's work, and one does not always know if that is appropriate.
>>
>> I also generally agree it would be better to have some sort of process
>> set up around the wiki. Curate it in some way, or have a more managed,
>> distilled version, that would be of use for newcomers. Indeed, it seems to
>> me there is an important separation between some pages, those that are more
>> discussion like, or more relevant only to experienced/involved members of
>> the D community, and other pages which are quite important for beginners
>> (like the Editors page and others linked from dlang.org), to offer a
>> Getting-Started kind of information.
>>
>
> Responding as someone who used to be much more involved in the D Wiki (I
> don't do much anymore due to having less time available), I think that a
> new wiki should be set up as a dlang.org subdomain. We don't have to
> write the wiki software in D, we could use a popular existing package (such
> as MediaWiki, Trac, GitHub, etc.). I'm sure we could generate a centithread
> of discussion about the pros and cons of different wiki software.
>
> The current wiki was generously set up by an individual who donated server space and wiki software for the D community to use many years ago, but I don't believe that person would be offended if we migrated to another system. We should only migrate the most important pages first (and as we migrate pages, we could indicate on the old page where the new page is). We'd only migrate pages that are already largely up-to-date and that we intend to maintain. The less useful pages would probably never get migrated to the new site, but the information on those pages may still be of use to someone on the old site.
>
> As someone who created many of these pages that are now outdated or obsolete, I'd hate to see them all disappear due to a wave of deletionism from newer members of the D community who have more time for deleting than updating.
>
> That's my idea, but I don't have time to implement it myself (I would be willing to help), but maybe someone else will get inspired to make something like this happen.
>
> jcc7
>

One option, and I don't even know how I feel about this, could actually
make it powered by D (Ddoc specifically).  I have a pull request <
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/d-programming-language.org/pull/98>
which enables website pages to be edited and a pull request made all online
(it's basically a moderated wiki).

Extending that by creating a wiki repository with appropriate moderators and adding that to the website is how it'd probably work.  Anyone with a github account could modify pages. One nice thing is that it'd match the look and feel of the current website and would easily integrate with all sections of it.  Syntax highlighting would work and references to documentation would be trivial.

There are issues though.
- Do we even want a moderated wiki? Given the current state of the wiki it
could be a good thing but given the current rate of pull request merging it
could be a bad thing.
- It would require frequent ddoc generation and deployment by someone
(Andrei, from my understanding of website deployment).  A script could
probably be written to monitor for commits and do this automatically but
it's certainly more complicated than an off the shelf wiki.
- Not many people actually know ddoc syntax.  It's not that complicated to
figure out but it's something to keep in mind.
- New pages could not be created using the online editor.  You'd have to
clone the repository and add the new page by hand.

Anyway, it's just something I thought I'd bring up as an option.

Regardless of this, I definitely think we should move it to wiki.dlang.org,
match the look of the current website, and institute quality/accuracy
checks. On the wxWidget's wiki they would put something along the lines of
"Information last reviewed for accuracy on <date>" up at the top of certain
pages so users can easily see if information could be old and inaccurate.
 I believe that's a good idea to integrate into whatever we end up doing
(even if it's just stay with the current wiki).

Regards,
Brad Anderson

On 3/7/12, Brad Anderson <eco@gnuk.net> wrote:
> - Do we even want a moderated wiki? Given the current state of the wiki it could be a good thing but given the current rate of pull request merging it could be a bad thing.

FWIW pull requests for dpl.org seem to be merged much faster than pulls for phobos/dmd. There are still a few pulls left that are quite old, but these are either waiting for implementation changes or still have some bugs that need fixing.

Personally I'd wholeheartedly welcome an integrated wiki to the site, having all information in one place is great for newcomers, and we would finally have an incentive to reorganize and update information from the old wiki.