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Date:      Tue, 29 Jan 2002 20:42:02 -0800
From:      Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org>
To:        "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net>
Cc:        doc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Practicalities of FAQ->Handbook migrations
Message-ID:  <20020130044202.GX5234@klapaucius.zer0.org>
In-Reply-To: <q37kq3nsea.kq3@localhost.localdomain>
References:  <20020121140800.A54903@blackhelicopters.org> <20020121215313.K18715@clan.nothing-going-on.org> <20020121174711.A56388@blackhelicopters.org> <20020127115139.GU5234@klapaucius.zer0.org> <q37kq3nsea.kq3@localhost.localdomain>

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On 2002-01-27 18:03 -0800, "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net> wrote:
> Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org> writes:
>=20
> > I understand the need for such an index document.  There is a wealth of
> > FreeBSD information in the FAQ, Handbook, Committer's Guide, articles,
> > books, manual pages, O'Reillynet articles, Daemon News articles,
> > hardcopy books, graphics, ascii art, and also a few hundred web sites,
> > some of it very difficult to find despite its potential utility to many
> > FreeBSD users.
> >=20
> > The Documentation Project seems the logical organization to provide an
> > index of pointers to and within these resources.  Instead of "jumbo
> > FAQ", though, perhaps the FreeBSD Documentation Index would be a better,
> > and sufficiently pretentious, name.  Is this the kind of thing you were
> > talking about, Michael?
>=20
> I have thought that the best way to handle such a massive and
> maintenance-intensive project, would be to have a Wiki
> (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki) for it.  Let users add and fix links as
> they will (subject to a team of monitors, mainly to back out vandalism).
> But that would be a large project in itself and there are legal risks.

Wikis are useful for small groups, but they don't scale well to large
efforts.  In addition, for a group that is accustomed to DocBook and
CVS, a Wiki is a good dozen steps backward.  Wikis can't be
automanglically changed into PDF, PS, text, or half a dozen other
formats; their change-control mechanisms are too simple; they can't
be locally edited by multiple developers; and it's yet another=20
markup language to learn, albeit a (too) simplistic one.

I'm not totally dissing WikiWikiWebs; they have their place.  I use
several of them on a regular basis.  But I don't think it's the=20
proper tool for this job.

Greg
--=20
Gregory S. Sutter                   Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm
mailto:gsutter@zer0.org             for a day.  Set a man on fire, and he'll
http://www.zer0.org/~gsutter/       be warm for the rest of his life.=20
hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/0x845DFEDD

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