In the press

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Tue Jul 15 20:56:49 CEST 2008


On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 07:17:54PM +0100, Hugo Mills wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 05:27:31PM +0000, Curtis Vaughan wrote:
> > Since Ken really liked OpenWRT's Wiki, I looked at it and see they use 
> > MoinMoin. So, I am willing to set up MoinMoin on a server to be used as 
> > an FR community wiki. 
> 
>    The quality of a wiki has little to do with the Wiki engine on
> which it runs. It is far more to do with having a highly proactive
> group of wiki editors, who between them read every single change made
> to the wiki, and can make suitable cross-references, indexes,
> corrections, updates and so forth to ensure that the content is easy
> to find, read and use.
> 
>    If you don't have such a group of people (and I'm not talking about
> OpenMoko employees here), it doesn't matter what wiki engine you use,
> or what website you have, your wiki won't go anywhere useful.
> 

Exactly. There is a lot of good information there, it just needs to be organized, and the bad (old, outdated, confusing) information has to be pruned out.

I think all it needs is for a few people to jump in and go, "Ack, this is awful, I'm going to clean it up". Every day. Several times a day, for a few minutes each time. I'd be glad to start by doing a "1973-ectomy": moving all references to an obsolete, no-longer-manufactured prototype somewhere else in the Wiki.

Another clever thing that OpenWRT guys do is they wrote a little bot so that a notification of any forum post or question gets inserted into the #openwrt IRC channel. Then they jump in immediately and answer it (and it draws other users/developers who might idling in the channel to go read/answer it too). The annoyance of getting blasted immediately (via IRC) provides an incentive for eliminating FAQ's by cleaning up the docs (and the software).

Something like that might be useful for Wiki entries too, or even mailing list posts. 

-ken




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