[A6] a6 wiki

[Chris Pickett]

Susan Baird wrote:

> Quite honestly, I'd much rather hear people step up and volunteer to 
> help pull this together. That's what's really needed here. I asked for 
> help once before and Chad was the only person who answered me. This is a 
> group document that everyone benefits from and as I said, there's lots 
> of REALLY good information - 4 years worth of excellent information. I 
> know because I've read every single post for the last 5 years. Just need 
> some help from you all to finish pulling it all together.

Sioux, the purpose of a wiki for the FAQ / T&T (in addition to hosting 
patch, mp3 downloads) serves two purposes as far as I can see:

1) publish all the stuff you've already done, immediately and in its 
current format, and wipe your hands of it.  No more editing of Word 
documents or non-wiki collaboration.  I know it's taken a bit of a toll 
on you, you need to stop.

2) give everyone *else* easy access to the information so that editing 
it is just a few mouseclicks away.

The idea is, it's not something that everyone needs to volunteer for 
before you go and do it.  It's a more laid back approach -- you put 
everything you currently have in the wiki, and then when someone has 
time or energy or motivation, they can go and edit and improve it.  As 
long as vandalism / spamming is somewhat monitored, you have a monotonic 
function: it's only going to improve over time.  Eventually, everything 
about the A6 will get in there, if people want it.

If they don't, then there's no point pushing them into contributing in 
the first place.  I do think that if we had a wiki, you could ask people 
who asked a question / discussed an issue on the mailing list to go and 
contribute what they'd learned, and there would be a pretty good chance 
they'd go and do it.  If not, next time it comes up, there's still the 
same chance.

Wiki's are in a perpetual state of *visible* incompletion, that's part 
of what encourages the collaboration on them.  You don't have to worry 
about rough edges, those are what make it grow.

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WhyWikiWorks
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WhyWikiWorksNot

If you can live with something as messy as that, then it will be great 
(and if you can't live with it, then you can always clean it up!). 
Often times things are much cleaner in their day-to-day lives... just 
look at the largest wiki out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

About Wikipedia: if they'd tried to get everyone to commit to the task 
before launching it, it never would have happened.  We started using a 
wiki for the software I hack on ( http://sablevm.org/wiki/HomePage ), 
and it's been a pretty good solution.  I think it would be even better 
if there were no locked pages at all, and all the information from 
http://sablevm.org was moved to the wiki and the main non-wiki HTML 
pages deleted -- this encourages a neat wiki because, well, you want 
your visitors to get a good impression.

I think you just need to take a breath and say, OK, let's do this, and 
trust that it's going to work out over time.

Cheers,
Chris