Hello,
I am writing this to you just because things need to be said. It might be that not everyone who reaches this email is the right person who should read this, but nevertheless I am annoyed.
I am deeply annoyed with the state the wiki is in and I have been annoyed for a long long time. There is so much documentation in there that is either in a bad state, is completely outdated or is now just wrong.
I often stated that I am willing to tolerate if there is information missing in one or the other of all the languages, but when it comes to a point where people are more confused by the documentation than it helps them... we need to do something.
Last night, I restructured the entire hardware section. It was really bad. Especially information about the various ARM hardware that is supported was all over the place. Some pages have been there twice with completely different things on them. Some had their own section.
The result of that is that the landing page of the hardware section (http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/hardware/start) was stripped to the bare essentials in my opinion. What are the requirements? What hardware should I use? Examples? Done.
Some things that have been on the very long page before were just moved to a sub-page. I find it very important to explain why certain decisions where made and what reasons are behind something. But having all that on the first page is not helping. People don't read long texts if they are searching for a particular thing. If someone is interested in more detail he or she will search for that any way. So the landing page shows the recommended hardware specification. All other information about that can be found over here: http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/hardware/requirements
Then I created a section which just handles the ARM hardware:
http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/hardware/arm/start
As mentioned before, there is no new information. This is just all the information collected from the rest of the wiki and restructured. The key element here is a table with all the hardware we support (or explicitly do not support). I figured that this is the most important information that the users are searching for. If you click on one of the boards, you will find additional information. Those pages are not the best and explain how to install an ARM board over and over again. That is good for now, but needs to be cleaned up as well in the near future.
I am telling you this because I want you (who ever is interested) to understand what I have in mind when I write these things. It may not the best thing, but I have some points why I am doing it like I do it and may be you can adopt some of them, too.
Clean design and clear structure is hugely important. This wiki holds so much information about IPFire that almost every questions can be answered. The problem with that is that it is very hard to find at times. If you know what you are searching for you will find the right page very quickly. If you are searching for something for the first time with no background information, you are practically screwed.
So to bring this all to a point: I am very much inclined to delete huge parts of the documentation.
I find it much better to have no information at all instead of providing the users with wrong information. Wrong could also mean just outdated or obsolete.
A few examples: We don't need pages which say "English version coming soon". This has been there since 2013. http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/addons/virtualisation/howto/debian_wheezy_xen_4.1
We also do not need installation guides for outdated software (here Debian). If anybody is going to install a virtualization host, they should certainly start with the current stable version. So either this needs to be updated or removed. http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/addons/virtualisation/howto/debian_xen_4.x
Why did someone even start writing a separate page for Wheezy (only in German) when there was already a page about the same topic with Squeeze? I imagine this has happened because the author was unaware of the existence of the one page.
This is just one of the many examples I can bring here and I should point out that I am not at all disappointed with the work many people have done here. There is only something massively wrong with how it is maintained. Outdated information isn't worth a penny.
There is a third page about the same topic handling Debian Lenny. Someone added a notes that this page is outdated. At this point I cannot imagine something else but deleting all of this. http://wiki.ipfire.org/de/addons/virtualisation/howto/debian_als_dom0_xen
The other topic that is the missing translation is the firewall section. Since almost a year now there is a completely rewritten firewall GUI. Nothing looks the same any more and some parts have become more difficult to use. Hence we wrote a very decent firewall documentation which no one ever translated into any other language.
It has been pointed out several times on the forums and many people made promises to actually do something about it. No one ever did. It was not even started.
I cannot help it thinking that there is just no interest in having a German translation. Many people argue often that it is important to keep documentation accessible in various languages and I completely agree with that. But if nobody cares doing the work I can not take you and your point serious.
I am especially picking on the German translation as we have a huge community of people who are speaking German. The translations of the other languages are not very much advanced so that people don't read these at all and even if they do, there is not so much outdated information in there (the installation works the same since years for instance).
So in the end there must be consequences. I am not sure about what is the right way - quite possibly is there no right way of doing this. But seriously guys, we cannot keep doing this in this way we are doing it right now. That is dangerous.
I wonder if someone has something to say about this matter. I would be happy to hear from you all. There are over 50 people subscribed to this list. So I will take silence as an answer.
Best, -Michael