Look at the "ArchWiki active users per month" graph. What happened in 2013? With the exception of the lockdown period, it has been decreasing since then.
Documentation is super important for complex things. I feel like it’s highly underrated by many otherwise great open source projects, to the severe detriment of the project. Nice to see an explicit focus on it.
Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared project?
I remember a while ago there was a small computer vision wiki that was very useful and somewhat widely used, not that many computer vision people at the time. Then, after around 2010 they decided to move the wiki to Wikipedia. You can guess what happened, original wiki was gone, very few articles survived because, of course, it's Wikipedia. A great resource just gone.
There are not just differences between distributions to consider, but also different distributions being on different versions of things. This would be difficult to organize.
> it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense.
This doesn't work as well as you think.
We did this in one large OSS project for documenting operations just for installs/setup/build/etc.
The problem is:
1. The list of differences get large fast if you aren't within the same family of OS like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
2. Information will get out of date for some distros over others. Unhelpful pricks start bitching and moaning and nobody wants to deal with it at that point.
3. Unhelpful pricks will also bitch and moan you delete the out of date sections
The Arch wiki is one of the best things the Linux community has produced. It's like a modern, improved and more complete version of TLDP.
I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.
I remember long before I started using Arch I would google something nuanced for Ubuntu and there it was on the Arch Linux wiki with a “for Ubuntu users do this” section to fix whatever my issue was, this happened multiple times.
I"m still absolutely floored with how good the archwiki is. I can't hype it up enough. I really did't know what I was doing with systemd until I read that wonderful article, and also, the link to why the arch maintainer switched that distro to systemd made my accept the change to it.
This is really exciting. I've used the Arch Wiki countless times for setting up or configuring something in Debian but wanting a resource more native to the platform. I hope they're able to produce a comparable wiki for Debian-based OSes.
I switched from Ubuntu to Arch because of the quality of the Arch wiki. Ubuntu search results were filled with so much misinformation that I realized it was a culture problem. Arch, with its higher barrier to entry, attracts users who maintain its standards.
> MediaWiki markup is different. It is weird and fragile; changing a single token can completely break a page. It is also, he said, difficult to write a proper or robust parser for the language.
The Arch wiki is the PostgreSQL documentation of Linux. Even if you're not using Arch or Postgres, it's a great starting point for how something is supposed to work and it covers enough details that you can extrapolate a bit.
It's one the reasons I'm using Arch. Great features are worth little to me if I don't know about them. What I like particularly about the wiki is their why sections that explain why one would want to choose one way over another. A good example of this is the page on data-at-rest encryption [1].
The Arch Linux community is one of the most toxic I know. First and foremost, there are members with tens of thousands of posts who become condescending and insulting when other members don’t dance to their tune. The Code of Conduct exists only on paper and is not enforced by the Arch leadership. This results in such behavior not only being tolerated but actively encouraged. Shame on them and shame on Debian for further encouraging this behaviour by inviting them to the DebConf.
> First and foremost, there are members with tens of thousands of posts who become condescending and insulting when other members don't dance to their tune.
Yes, there are some regulars on the forums that get might get snippy with you if you ask for troubleshooting help while refusing to read the forum rules, RTFM, or are incapable of following basic troubleshooting steps. I don't really see the issue.
This seems heavy on self-promotion. Meanwhile, Arch is still x86-centric (in spite of fragmented, unofficial forks) and doesn't do LTS, while Debian supports multiple architectures and stability. Debian does have a lot of rambling, aspirationally-unfinished, outdated, and duplicated wiki pages.
This obsession with changing what works for something else to please some shady people is annoying
This conformism is painful to witness, it happens to everything internet related, and the goal here seems to be related to the idea that internet should require a digital ID/wallet to browse
One feature I wish the Arch wiki had last time I used it was conditionally hiding sections. It presented various options throughout their guides and depending on which options you chose later sections weren't relevant. I often found I'd get partway through a step only to discover it wasn't relevant.
It would be great if, when presented with different options, you could indicate which one you'd selected and have it hide the irrelevant stuff further down the page
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadThis doesn't work as well as you think.
We did this in one large OSS project for documenting operations just for installs/setup/build/etc.
The problem is:
1. The list of differences get large fast if you aren't within the same family of OS like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
2. Information will get out of date for some distros over others. Unhelpful pricks start bitching and moaning and nobody wants to deal with it at that point.
3. Unhelpful pricks will also bitch and moan you delete the out of date sections
I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.
The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.
PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.
A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki
Good thing mwparserfromhell exists, then.
I hope debian sees improvement here with this announcement
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Data-at-rest_encryption
Yes, there are some regulars on the forums that get might get snippy with you if you ask for troubleshooting help while refusing to read the forum rules, RTFM, or are incapable of following basic troubleshooting steps. I don't really see the issue.
Based. The Arch Code of Conduct is also free from wokeisms. Never used Arch, but I may make the switch considering these things.
This conformism is painful to witness, it happens to everything internet related, and the goal here seems to be related to the idea that internet should require a digital ID/wallet to browse
Sad era to live in
It would be great if, when presented with different options, you could indicate which one you'd selected and have it hide the irrelevant stuff further down the page