wiki.dlang.org: How about replacing MediaWiki with a Git repo?

Mindy Batek (0xEAB) desisma at heidel.beer
Tue Aug 4 19:29:45 UTC 2026


On Tuesday, 4 August 2026 at 18:20:29 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
>> (Does GitHub currently discriminate users because of their 
>> location?)
>
> It does (as I think does any business which is based in the US):
>
> https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/github-and-trade-controls
>
> and some anecdotal horror stories:
>
> https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/158764

That’s indeed bad, but also affects the bug tracker as well as 
code contributions.


>> To clarify:
>> I’m not trying to raise the bar for knowledge-base 
>> contributions.
>
> Okay, but we do have to agree that anything that's between 
> clicking "save" and the contribution becoming world visible 
> counts as a barrier.

Sure thing.
But the same applies to anything that comes between seeing the 
opportunity to contribute and the save button; e.g. Anubis, a 
wiki.dlang.org account, MediaWiki syntax, the quality of 
spell-checking in my browser, …

>> It could likely be removed if serving the wiki’s webpages were 
>> cheap computing-wise.
>
> This may be something that's worth revisiting. I recall that 
> MediaWiki does have built-in support for accelerated serving 
> from an in-memory cache.

Setting up Varnish might help ease the load.

>> I’ve sent you an email with a fullscreen screenshot and the 
>> model name of the affected device.
>> Should it bounce feel free to shoot me an email from an 
>> address where you accept replies to.
>
> Got it, thanks! I've deployed the changes to the D wiki and 
> soon to other protected sites.

Neat! ^^

>
>> - Go: <https://go.googlesource.com/wiki>
>
> Not world editable :(

→ <https://github.com/golang/wiki> — take a closer look, the way 
they handle PRs may be misleading to the eye.

>> - Rust: Haven’t been able to find a “rust-lang wiki”.
>
> :(

- There’s the non-wiki: <https://rustwiki.org/en/>
- and <https://rust.fandom.com/wiki/Rust_Wiki> which is something 
else ;)


>> - Nim: <https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/>
>
> Looks like someone put in quite a bit of effort here, but it 
> petered out.
>
> ![](https://dump.cy.md/b9c2132b5fe9d984e2fc871383e5d41f/Screenshot%202026-08-04%20at%2018-10-27%20History%20for%20Home%20%C2%B7%20nim-lang_Nim%20Wiki.png)

Off-topic question: Has our wiki that much more activity?

> GitHub wikis

That’s a red herring.
I won’t start a witch hunt to find out which fisherman of this 
thread is to blame for it. But I I won’t put any afford into 
commenting on that other than:

###############################################################
# I DO NOT INTEND TO USE THE BUILT-IN WIKI FEATURE OF GITHUB. #
# I HAVE NEVER SUGGESTED TO USE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.        #
###############################################################

> I also found out today that GitHub wikis are not indexed by 
> search engines, so information added there won't show up in 
> search results.

Okay, okay, one very last comment: I’m afraid your search engine 
sucks ;)

Result #2 on <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=vst2+dplug&ia=web> 
is <https://github.com/AuburnSounds/Dplug/wiki/Dplug-VST2-Guide> 
for me.

>
>> People considered trustworthy enough could be added to a team 
>> of the GitHub organization and gain direct commit/push access.
>
> I think that misses the goal a little. For core members, we 
> have dlang.org already;

I think the bar for documentation content on dlang.org is 
currently much higher than what the current content on 
wiki.dlang.org meets.

> the wiki is specifically for everyone else, i.e. the community. 
> I'm also wary of the social dynamics and consequences of there 
> being one group with "direct edit" superpowers.

Fair.

>> If we establish a policy to merge any contribution that isn’t 
>> outright bad, there little effort needed.
>
> I am not sure about this, but I think others can offer more 
> insight here than I can, especially if they do PR review 
> regularly. I recall that at some point we were already severely 
> constrained by reviewer time. Personally I probably wouldn't 
> enjoy being pinged (or having to review every day) a ton of 
> typo fixes or minor additions about people's pet projects that 
> few others care about (but that's exactly what a wiki enables 
> people to host).

I’d love to have Nic chime in with his opinion on this.

I can only speak for myself, but I have a notable amount of 
reviewer time left with no applicable content I’m qualified to or 
have interest to review for the teams I’m part of.

>> We could even merge it into a subfolder under the main domain, 
>> dlang.org. That would express our dearest respect for those 
>> contributions. Might even come with an SEO benefit. (I’m no 
>> expert at all, rather clueless actually, but at work we had a 
>> client whose SEO guy asked us to deploy their web app as a 
>> sub-URL of the main website for better ranking compared to a 
>> subdomain.)
>
> Probably official and community content is better kept separate?

No preference. Neither me to decide.


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