[Python-ideas] Encouraging more use of the Python wiki

[Skip Montanaro]

I'm going to add one more bit here about wiki gardening.

BITD, the main website had many pages which today would be called
listicles. The problem was that those lists were dynamic. They weren't
just the "top ten scientific Python modules of all time" or the "seven
best packaging tools." They were whatever was at the front of the
author's brain at some point in the past. Having these static pages
given the imprimatur of the PSF when in fact none of the site
maintainers were obviously responsible for (or interested in) keeping
them up-to-date did a disservice to the community and to authors of
other packages which weren't represented in those lists. In addition,
there were more barriers to update than necessary (essentially, figure
out how to report the problem, offer suggested fix(es), then have them
swallowed up into the site update mechanism).

One of the main uses envisioned for the wiki was as a place where
these listicles could be maintained by the greater Python
community. For some things, that's worked out pretty well. The most
obvious thing that comes to mind is the PythonTraining page. That
works because the people whose skills are represented on that page
have a very good reason for keeping things up-to-date: it's free
advertising for their businesses.

Other listicle type pages haven't been keep as up-to-date.  For
example, the PythonEditors page was last updated in Feb 2014, is huge
(and might benefit from being split into multiple pages), and probably
no longer accurately represents the available editors or IDEs which
support Python.

The takeaway in my mind is that we could probably use "gardeners" to
take over active maintenance of these listicle pages. That, coupled
with a couple "master gardeners" to develop some suitable structure,
and some landscape crews to prune dead/outdated/no-longer-useful
pages, would likely go a long way to improving the quality of the
wiki.

Skip