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