[Arm-netbook] policy for wiki and mailing list

[lkcl luke]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 12:28 PM, David Given <dg at cowlark.com> wrote:
> On 19/05/12 01:41, lkcl luke wrote:
> [...]
>> 1) you put information that is useful to other people - no matter how
>> patchy, scant, incorrect, incomplete, in the wrong place, and no
>> matter how much you are "afraid it might be criticised" - on the wiki.
>
> I utterly disagree with this.

 yes - i know!

> A wiki is totally the wrong place for this
> kind of information. A mailing list is.
>
> Posts to a mailing list are timestamped, attributed, are easily
> searchable with any common search engine, and occur in context with the
> discussion that prompted the post.

... and then what?  what happens when people get overloaded and cannot
keep up with the discussion?  i'm already having difficulty keeping
track of everything.

 mailing lists are short-term "snapshots" of what's going on.

> Information in a wiki is none of the above.

 information in a wiki is what you MAKE IT.  if you don't BELIEVE that
it can be useful [because you simply don't believe, therefore cannot
be bothered] then of *course* it's not useful.

> It's just a random
> collection of stuff with no intrinsic order and no context.

 then that's a matter of being disorganised!

take a look at the wiki for xanadux developers, it's *incredibly* well
organised.   look at this page:
 http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/HTC_Universal

 look at this page:
 http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/UniversalResearch

 look at this page:
  http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/BlueAngel_Linux

 look at this page:
   http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=BlueangelKernel

 that was [about 20% of] the stuff that i was involved with - without
the wiki it would have been absolutely impossible to coordinate the
research, show people what the progress was, get them interested and
usefully and productively involved.

 even i could not have kept track, just on my own!  with so much to
do, i could never remember from one day to the next what had or had
not been done, let alone tell anyone else what needed to be done!

 there are ways to *successfully* use wikis and there are ways to
completely fail to make any progress, headway or have them be useful
for any purpose whatsoever.



> Putting the patch on the wiki would be worse than useless, because it
> would actively add to the amount of misinformation on the wiki: by
> putting it in the 'formal' documentation, it makes it look as if it's a
> recommended procedure, which it is absolutely not.

 ok - we're a little bit behind: amery already created an issue on
github, at henrik's suggestion, and i've recorded the link to that
bugreport on the relevant wiki page.

 l.