On Jan 4, 2015, at 8:13 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 11:01:08PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
For those curious as to "Why not the wiki?", a Sphinx project hosted on a pull request capable service like GitHub, BitBucket or Kallithea offers a much nicer workflow for reviewing of proposed changes, together with an integrated issue tracker for submitting proposals for updates (https://github.com/pypa/python-packaging-user-guide/ is the project behind packaging.python.org, for example).
The concept of "proposed changes" goes completely against the grain of community-managed content. Imagine if Wikipedia required you to make pull requests.
The question to be asked is not whether "pull requests" are "nicer" than a wiki, but whether this information needs to be owned by a single person (or a small group thereof), and hence use the packaging.python.org module, or owned by the whole community, and hence use the wiki model.
At the moment, the wiki is horribly underused. I'm not blaming anyone for that, I'm just as much to blame as anyone else. I have made far more contributions to the ActiveState recipes than I have to the Python wiki. But I'd really like to see the wiki become the second place people look for information, after the official docs. And hopefully there won't be a need for a third place :-)
Although the quality of contrabutions is variable, the PHP community has made a very interesting decision to integrate community-supplied information with official docs:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.dechex.php
I wonder how we might do something similar?
On the other hand, a number of pages on the Wiki are either completely out of date because nobody cares about them or need to be locked because too many people care about it and they fight over which project should be named as recommended. Wiki content can be good for more factual based information but I think the format is relatively poor for things which are more opinion based. --- Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA