D Wiki - Why is it in such shambles?

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 03/03/2012 01:55, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 14:49:54 UTC, Robert Rouse wrote:
>> I'm relatively new to D, so I'm looking at everything I can. The D
>> wiki linked from the D site has so much outdated information and
>> entries that are more talk pages than actual entries (e.g.
>> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?ComingFrom/Ruby )
>>
>> If that wiki is not the best place to go for information (besides the
>> newsgroup), what is?
>
> If you do not find the page helpful, please delete it/remove the
> reference to it. The wiki works best when someone is willing to
> make it better, and removing useless information is part of that.

That's a tricky thing to do. While it's easy to add new information to 
the wiki, removing it is not as clear-cut: it requires someone to be 
able to determine that information is outdated/incorrect/obsolete, and 
to be able to correct it (in case the correction is not as simple as 
deleting, but rather fixing some entry). And even so, unless the error 
in the information is glaring, people might be reticent to do it, as it 
implies "interfering" with someone else's work, and one does not always 
know if that is appropriate.

I also generally agree it would be better to have some sort of process 
set up around the wiki. Curate it in some way, or have a more managed, 
distilled version, that would be of use for newcomers. Indeed, it seems 
to me there is an important separation between some pages, those that 
are more discussion like, or more relevant only to experienced/involved 
members of the D community, and other pages which are quite important 
for beginners (like the Editors page and others linked from dlang.org), 
to offer a Getting-Started kind of information.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer