From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: PostgreSQL @ Sun
To: Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Developer's Wiki
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:09:49 -0700
User-Agent: KMail/1.8.2
Cc: pgsql-www@postgresql.org, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>,
	Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>, Dave Page <dpage@vale-housing.co.uk>,
	"pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
References: <C11F9B25.131C6%dpage@vale-housing.co.uk>
	<200609161225.16961.josh@agliodbs.com>
	<877j03y50r.fsf@enterprisedb.com>
In-Reply-To: <877j03y50r.fsf@enterprisedb.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <200609161309.50052.josh@agliodbs.com>

Greg,

> I think the lessons of wikipedia is precisely that you *don't* want to add
> such barriers. You want to let people add stuff pretty much freely. That
> encourages people to get involved and put up information.

The other lesson of Wikipedia is that maintaining wiki quality for a generally 
editable wiki requires a full-time dedicated staff.   We don't even have any 
volunteers who have 4 hours/week to commit to cleaning up the wiki, unless 
you're volunteering.

This is *particularly* true of the TODO stuff.  We simply don't want Joe User 
adding their personal wishlist to the TODOs, and that's exactly what will 
happen if the TODO list is world-writable.  TODOs should be items which have 
been hashed out here on the Hackers list, and the wiki page should list the 
specification which is the general consensus.

If we had a "user documentation wiki", then *that* should be world-editable, 
but again that would require community volunteers to dedicate to cleaning it 
up.  The developer wiki is by and for actual contributors.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco