D Wiki - Why is it in such shambles?

[Justin C Calvarese]

On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 14:43:59 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 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 wiki linked from the D site has so much outdated information 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 outdated/incorrect/obsolete, and to be able to correct it (in 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.

Responding as someone who used to be much more involved in the D 
Wiki (I don't do much anymore due to having less time available), 
I think that a new wiki should be set up as a dlang.org 
subdomain. We don't have to write the wiki software in D, we 
could use a popular existing package (such as MediaWiki, Trac, 
GitHub, etc.). I'm sure we could generate a centithread of 
discussion about the pros and cons of different wiki software.

The current wiki was generously set up by an individual who 
donated server space and wiki software for the D community to use 
many years ago, but I don't believe that person would be offended 
if we migrated to another system. We should only migrate the most 
important pages first (and as we migrate pages, we could indicate 
on the old page where the new page is). We'd only migrate pages 
that are already largely up-to-date and that we intend to 
maintain. The less useful pages would probably never get migrated 
to the new site, but the information on those pages may still be 
of use to someone on the old site.

As someone who created many of these pages that are now outdated 
or obsolete, I'd hate to see them all disappear due to a wave of 
deletionism from newer members of the D community who have more 
time for deleting than updating.

That's my idea, but I don't have time to implement it myself (I 
would be willing to help), but maybe someone else will get 
inspired to make something like this happen.

jcc7