Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

[Kyle Sexton]

All,

I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on something I setup over this past
weekend.  I put up a site at http://notmuchwiki.org with notes I took
while getting started with notmuch[1], along with a skeleton for more
information that I'll be updating as I learn. 

There is a disclaimer on the front page saying:

"Please refer to the official page for more information.  This wiki is
not endorsed, sponsored, or recommended by the official notmuch
community."

My goal is to make a site where the documentation is easy to update,
and attractive.  My concern is having too many places out there for
information.  I tried to assuage that with the disclaimer pointing to
the canonical site.  Does the community think there is space for an
unofficial wiki like this?

[1]: Most of the stuff I have written so far is under 'user setups' at
     http://www.notmuchwiki.org/display/usersetup/mocker

-- 
Kyle Sexton

Re: Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

[David Bremner]

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On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:39:47 -0500, Kyle Sexton <ks@mocker.org> wrote:
> 
> My goal is to make a site where the documentation is easy to update,
> and attractive.  My concern is having too many places out there for
> information.  I tried to assuage that with the disclaimer pointing to
> the canonical site.  Does the community think there is space for an
> unofficial wiki like this?

[ For those of you following along at home, notmuchuchmail.org is 
  an ikiwiki instance, writable by anonymous git push ]

First, it's great that you want to give something back to the notmuch
project.  As a project, I think we should be primarily concerned with
the quality of the official documentation that ships with the software, 
but I recognize that some things are too transient or specialized to fit
in the official docs.

Personally, I would much rather you help improve the notmuch wiki than
fork it.

If you want to have your personal site, like a blog, of course that's
fine. But if you expect other people to contribute to your wiki instead
of the official one (and the generic name kind of suggests that you do,
as compared to mocker.org), then I think it isn't helpful. The set of
contributors to the wiki (like the overall notmuch community) is
extremely small, and splitting that will decrease the quality of both
splits.

If there are technical barriers preventing contributing to the notmuch
wiki, then the folk on #notmuch would be happy to help with that.  It
might just be that you prefer some other wiki software; unfortunately
these are the sorts of compromises needed to make free software projects
(and other projects) work.  Or you can agitate to have the project
change it's wiki, if you feel that strongly about it.

David

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Re: Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

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On Mon, Mar 26 2012, Kyle Sexton <ks@mocker.org> wrote:
> I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on something I setup over this past
> weekend.  I put up a site at http://notmuchwiki.org with notes I took
> while getting started with notmuch[1], along with a skeleton for more
> information that I'll be updating as I learn. 

Hey, Kyle.  I really have to agree with David that I would much rather
see everyone pool their time and energy into making the one wiki we have
better, rather than see things spread out over multiple wikis.  If the
current wiki is not attractive enough (it could definitely be snazzier)
please help us make it better!  Any and all contributions appreciated.

jamie.

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Re: Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

[Kyle Sexton]

Agreed, with a smaller community it'll be a detriment to have two places for information. I do think having to edit the wiki via git makes things harder overall, but that's another thread. I'll take down the site tonight. Thanks for the honest feedback. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 31, 2012, at 5:31 PM, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 26 2012, Kyle Sexton <ks@mocker.org> wrote:
>> I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on something I setup over this past
>> weekend.  I put up a site at http://notmuchwiki.org with notes I took
>> while getting started with notmuch[1], along with a skeleton for more
>> information that I'll be updating as I learn. 
> 
> Hey, Kyle.  I really have to agree with David that I would much rather
> see everyone pool their time and energy into making the one wiki we have
> better, rather than see things spread out over multiple wikis.  If the
> current wiki is not attractive enough (it could definitely be snazzier)
> please help us make it better!  Any and all contributions appreciated.
> 
> jamie.

Re: Unofficial notmuch wiki concerns

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

On Sat, Mar 31 2012, Kyle Sexton <ks@mocker.org> wrote:
> Agreed, with a smaller community it'll be a detriment to have two
> places for information. I do think having to edit the wiki via git
> makes things harder overall, but that's another thread. I'll take down
> the site tonight. Thanks for the honest feedback.

And thank *you* very much for your enthusiasm for documenting notmuch!
It's really very much appreciated.

jamie.