I don't need a vanity page here (cf. [http://snurl.com/jbrye]), but I could do with a bilesump...


I can't stand Wikis. They've always been first and foremost a way of losing documentation: a way for programmers to fool themselves into thinking that they don't need to WTFM - it'll write itself! So they come up with a page name nobody will guess, scrawl a few lines of stream-of-consciousness unexplanation, make every fifth word bold, red, italic, large, or flashing, and then abandon it to rot.

(The one glorious exception is Wikipedia, which gets around the organisation problem by simply having a page - or at least redirection - for every single topic.)

Of course, I'm biassed against wikis and similar online interfaces due to having first encountered them and found them unfriendly back in the days when I was on a pitiful dial-up connection. But even now when I'm on broadband, I find contributing to wikis deeply unrewarding.

In particular, copy-editing somebody else's wikiage is utter hell, compared to (for instance) submitting commented patches for a piece of documentation via a mailing list. Instead of working in your choice of editor, you're stuck in some crappy text-entry widget in your web-browser. Instead of being able to do global regexp search-&-replace operations, you have to push the individual characters around with your nose. And if ever you make a misstep, there's only one level of undo: discard everything.

Wikis are fundamentally competitive, not cooperative. Each new contributor sees only the current version, and contributes by destroying it - you don't get to say "yes, I like Sam's suggested approach to the overall structure, but we should combine it with a generalised version of Pat's criticism of the first paragraph... how about if we do this - what's the word I'm looking for here?"

Yes, I know in theory there are diff-generators and discussion pages and so on, but they're no help. Imagine, for instance, that I find a piece of text that's completely unclear. If I'm working via debian-l10n-english I can directly ask the author "What did you mean here?" - in a wiki, on the other hand, nothing that straightforwardly effective is ever likely to happen. Indeed, if the original author ever comes back it'll probably mean the return of all the errors I just spent half an hour painstakingly weeding out. Meanwhile, I won't even know that my work has been undone.

And as for things like the DPN... I'm just baffled. It's sent out as e-mail, so what's the point of filling it with half-baked markup?


CategoryProposedDeletion