Wiki format preferences by the community

Quick recap of my points from our discussion

Yep - as it is now, sadly not many use it the way it’s meant to be, it’s not that hard to find per se, but hard to interact (both read / write perspective) compared to forum where you can cite parts directly, easily get quick feedback and spark productive discussion on article, from same infrastructure of forum etc.


I say forum is unbeatable, however you can have both or just external one easily, if few conditions would be met:

  1. Wiki should use markdown (at least GitHub like standard, better Discourse one with all the fancy stuff like tables / html / smileys / details tags) - that is super-important for people to interact easily both writing & reading!

  2. Should be properly categorized and easily searchable (just like forum)

  3. Maybe in terms of platform agnostic approach best idea would be to write it in one place (for example as @joekamprad offered GitHub / GitLab and then auto-populate or on-demand-populate it wherever we want be it site, forum or whatever else in future), but that may be technically challenging.


If we go only forum route, this is a must:

  1. You can create whole wiki or FAQ top category, problem with that is it can become really big…Well it’s little hard to find anything anyways, that can be solved easily however with top pinned post with table of content for such wiki

  2. All wiki posts must be marked [wiki] prefix in title, so it would be fast & easy to find in search

Some reasoning why:

You shouldn’t underestimate power of Discourse forum - as it is one of main point of interest for any wise Linux community, it draws a lot of attention and rightfully so, coz it provokes to action / reaction and therefore creation of new things like that, social-network style almost, for example i would never write and share such article [ FOSS screen space ray tracing with any game and GPU ] outside of Dicourse (because i would had no urge, call to share, and feedback of how many users actually struggle with that things)…


Some general notes

In my mind our job for wiki should be focus on:

  • Accessibility
  • Ease of understanding
  • Best practices
  • Step by step guides
  • Summaries

Well pretty much what it already is :slight_smile:

Because all the info is out there in the internet already, especially archwiki, but it’s really hard to grasp archwiki as it is, for a lot of people - so our job is kinda translation from alien to human

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