Erik Moeller skrev:

Jonathan-

...

/ Now, the last week, some of our contributors have told us that they feel

/>/ like duplicating the Wikipedia project, something that I cannot fully />/ agree to. Wikipedia is encyclopedic and documentation isn't, meaning />/ that it not really fits there. I know about Wikibooks, but the whole />/ concept of a "single place for GNU/Linux and Free Software />/ documentation" would be a little far off. / I'm not sure I can follow you here. I initiated openfacts.berlios.de for this purpose a while ago, but it never really took off, and I did not put much further effort into it. Today I think that this kind of work should take place on Wikibooks. You can create a portal page specifically for open source documentation, and we'd be glad to set up some convenient redirect there like opensource.wikibooks.org.

Sounds great to me, could I get any help or advice on doing this, please? I think that this quite well addresses the needs that a free software wiki has.

Of course there are drawbacks: Recent changes will include changes to all books; linking specifically within the context of the open source section will require specifying some kind of namespace or pseudo-namespace, etc. But I believe that the right answer to these problems is to gradually improve the software to better deal with these issues, e.g. by filtering recent changes by namespace, and making certain namespaces "closed", so that any link you create within them points to pages in the same namespace.

That is a good point, and does not seem too hard to achieve.

In other words, I'd rather you outline the needs you think must be met before Wikibooks can become a useful open source portal, than starting a separate project.

The wiki is of course supposed to be quite easily navigated, both for newbies and more advanced users. Also, the documentation is supposed to be on-topic and focused, just like any howto you would find on tldp. Unix manuals are also a little special, we have solved that on our wiki by using a separate namespace (would that even be possible on wikibooks?). Internationalization is also important, and is also one of the reasons we started our wiki in the first place. There is a lot of Linux documentation on the net, but most of it is in english. The need for high-quality documentation in other languages is the driving factor here.

Jonathan