clarify wiki purpose for new users #34
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I have stumbled upon the Lix wiki several times when looking for information not contained in the regular Lix docs, among them meta-issues such as Nix lang v2.
It is unclear to me, as someone who is not part of the Lix Matrix environment, what exactly the wiki should hold in terms of information, and more importantly who is allowed or supposed to edit it.
Also tying in with this, I do not think either Matrix or Bookstack to be particularly good at allowing publicly visible discussions to be held in a traceable way as I think a Wiki should be both for user provided content serving as a source for unofficial information or volatile as well as having discussions related to said content right next to it.
So with the lack of the discussion portion I feel very uncomfortable editing the wiki for any reason other than fixing typos at best, even if it is information fitting the topic of the page since I am not sure whether I am supposed to, or whether it's the right place (i.e. I can't add "should we add a section for $thing here?" as a discussion item).
Matrix on the other hand, being more of a group chat at heart is great for asking questions, but as we all know instant messengers and group chats are not a replacement for a wiki or forum.1 2 3 4
Even when the wiki is telling me to join the discussion on Matrix I cannot see whether I'm the first, tenth, or hundredth person saying the same thing, unlike for example the NixOS discourse (one of the first things implemented by the auxolotl project), which large leads to me just not participating at all.
This is something that IMHO is one of the primary purposes of a Wiki, therefore any guidance of whether or not the wiki is supposed to handle that kind of information would be useful.
Bookstack kinda lacks the usual wiki features for the discussion part, unless you start creating a talk page for every bookstack page or explicitly state how to provide discussion content inline.
IIRC bookstack support both HTML comments as well as Notice/Warning banners, so creating a notice banner for "there is a discussion about $thing in the below paragraph" with the discussion happening in an HTML comment within that notice would work, but it doesn't feel well done either.
Confluence back where I used to work had that inline comment and discussion feature, but Confluence isn't a thing for other reasons anyway.
With all that said, what is the wiki supposed to contain, and who is supposed to edit it, and can someone add that to the wiki in a way that is very visible and clear (a book called "welcome to the wiki" or "getting started on the wiki", etc.)?
It would also be nice to have the community section of the Lix website even list the wiki at all.
If required I can split off part of this into a second issue for "more accessible and public discussion spaces" or similar to move my complaints about Matrix to.