Ok, no TOC, let's use the anarchy of a wiki
But I still need, as a Linux/Slack noob, an ORDERED list of things to do. Think of the install guide. It IS ordered, and there's a reason. But ok, I understand there's no point for the whole wiki.

Eric, I said I will copy your articles about networking because I thought they were good as a starting point. Why always reinvent the wheel ? I agree that the wiki shouldn't be a copycat, but why can't it be the best SOURCE of Slack docs ? As the final goal of the wiki is to be shown on docs.slack.com, it can be 'borrowed' articles AND new articles. AFAIK, PV doesn't rewrite the whole GNU softs stack, neither the kernel or KDE. He takes the best ones, aggregate them in his distro and ensure they will work perfectly together.
I wanted to use your article, rework it and fill the wiki with. What's the purpose of just changing the words, if it's to keep the same meaning ? We're not at school annymore when you borrowed someone's work and you just rephrase it so the teacher won't see you cheated. And as vharishankar said, the sources can be added at the end of the doc (like Wikipedia sources).
When I read "For instance, the original edition of the Slack Book was GPL licensed, which forced Alan Hicks to do a full re-write of the book in his own wordings - the current Beta Book", with all due respect to the original authors, I really wonder what open source means ... And what a waste of time ! I thought as long as you keep the original authors' name as a source, you could do whatever needed to besten the original work. Isn't open source a way to SHARE ideas, and let the best of us provide the best doc/software ? Do the words "original work by", "inspired by" have no place in the open source community ? I do not believe it's stealing, as long as the original author's name (and maybe a link to the original source) is provided. But I think I may start being offtopic here, and licenses are a hell of a mess (BTW, if someone could explain the GPL better to me, I'd be delighted. Having read excerpts, and the explanation from the slackbook itself, I don't see why people have to change the wordings of a GPL-licensed document. In private if possible, to keep the discussion focused on the wiki).

There is another thing I would like to see in the wiki: a versioning system for the docs. So when an english doc (which will be the source of ALL translations) is modified, translators know they have to add the changes to their translations. I'm not talking about a SVN huh, something simpler. This would exclude for example typos/rephrasing edits. I want to start translating, but without keeping track of the changes, that'll be hard to always compare the ENG/FR versions.

PS:
I prefer doc in english, but thanks a lot ! After having read 'man svn' to know how this works on Slack, I will get this trunk

That's what Eric suggested we use Woodsman's proposed TOC for. Have a look through that list, see if you can find anything that hasn't been dealt with before, or anything new to say about something that has been dealt with, and write something about it.

I've added Woodsman's list to the contributing section.

You will have to get used to new concepts then :-) You do not read a wiki, front to back. You search the TOC or use the search entry box and find what you are looking for. This project is not meant to produce a book as the end goal. That makes it different than http://slackbook.org/ . And by the way, Alan Hicks told me that he has started working on the book again. So who knows that we will see there in the near future.

I did not doubt your good intentions, let me say that up front. But, I have been in this business for a long time.
You sound like you are part of the current generation for whom ownership and copyright are empty words? Remember that everything you copy is the work of someone else. That someone has to be credited for the work he did, even if you make enhancements to the copy... unless the original author explicitly placed his work in the public domain.
If a piece of documentation/program code/art/whatever is distributed with a LICENSE then you have to respect that license. If you do not agree to the terms of the license then you should not use the material.

Most important: if you intend to add content to the Slackware Documentation wiki without proper credits and attribution then theoretically you compromise Slackware if the Wiki is hosted as docs.slackware.com.

There are a few things I am going to very inflexible about when taking charge of the Documentation Project. The topic of copyright and licenses is one of those things.

I guess you have not yet found the "old revisions" tab above each page? That would give you a quick overview of the changes for each revision of a document.

A translation which has an older revision date than the english original will have a yellow warning at the top of the page. I edited http://taper.alienbase.nl/dokuwiki/slackware:slackware to show you what I mean. If you open the russian translation at http://taper.alienbase.nl/dokuwiki/r...ware:slackware you will the ""outdated"" message on top unless the russian author updates his translation...

Eric

Is that only for major changes or does it include minor?

deleted.

I won't take it poorly if this is rejected outright, but...

If we are going with a wiki format - as opposed to an "author-owner" SlackBuilds style format - what would the reaction be if the quality of the initial pages are poor?

For instance, I'll readily admit that my familiarity with much of the in's and out's of Slackware configuration is lacking, but I do know how to do some things, like install the nVidia driver. Now, unlike some others, I just use the nVidia installer, not the SBo package, and I even (!!) let it edit my xorg.conf. I haven't had any problems, so I might just write a wiki entry explaining how to install the nVidia driver say yes to all it suggests. That article would be missing a lot of information (installing via SBo, hand-editing xorg.conf, etc, etc, etc) compared to what it needs to become, but it would be a valid, necessary entry. Right?

If we're really using the 'power' of the wiki, it seems to me that this would be fine, as I'm sure that someone (who knows) would see this, be motivated by my lack of skillz, and take it upon themselves to add in other relevant bits.

If we're insisting on author-ownership, then (remember, this is hypothetical, please) I may feel it's too much of a commitment to track down relevant information, absorb it, rewrite/copy it into a final document, make sure I get all sources, and upload it only to find out that brianL beat me to it!

So, what is the community's/admin's opinion(s) on how to proceed? Perhaps this just brings us back to an admin-generated Minimal List of Necessary Wiki Entries debate? What if a list of topics was drafted up (um, like by looking at Archwiki, maybe?), the appropriate page names made (um, unsorted:PageName for example), and authors invited to do their worst? A better idea might be to abstain from making empty pages (messy, messy), but - as mentioned before - to go through a Woodsman-like list and draft simple yet accurate and informative pages.

OK, I think I've rambled on long enough...

As said before, we DISCUSS things here, so I always listen, and don't take things personnaly, just write my opinion, and respect others !

I agree with respecting one's work ! Ok I'm only 30, but copyright/ownership MEANS something for me (it's 15 years I'm working almost exclusively on Windoze/Win products, so yes, I know about that things Just joking).
What I want to say is, open source/free software has been brought on the table for us to SHARE things. And not re-doing everything. As long as everyone agrees that the SOURCE must be written, I don't see why we can't aggregate already written docs, that was my point. You don't allow me/us to copy your article ? Fine, I'll respect that, and to show you I effectively do, you can see I didn't copy anything !

I did already, I hate the way wiki are organized but try to understand em I just tried it, I quickly created the very same page in the fr section, and the yellow message doesn't show. I tried even editing once after creation. Still no yellow thing.
If this is working, OK, was just curious about how this works effectively, as edition dates for similar documents may be far away from each other ! Does it only work with approved docs ?

Side note: "The Official Release of Slackware Linux by Patrick Volkerding is an advanced Linux operating system, designed with the twin goals of ease of use and stability as top priorities". Isn't it stability and security ?

deleted.

In that case, I would just strongly suggest to use SlackBuild.org's script. Dead easy:

Fire up sbopkg.

Add 'nvidia-driver' and 'nvidia-kernel' to the build queue.

Process.

And that's all the magic there is.

Of course, different ways lead to Saint-Bauzille-de-Putois, but in that case, there is sort of a convention to do things in a certain manner.

FYI

You will notice that all dokuwiki links to http://taper.alienbase.nl/dokuwiki/ will suddenly end up as http://docs.slackware.com/ ... if you were logged in you'll have to login again because your cookie has a new host reference.

I hope that change did not disrupt any page editing.

Eric

Whenever known, attribution must be a requirement. When original authorship is unknown, at least attribute the original web site.

In many technical writing environments, a revision history is retained for each document. A similar approach should apply to this wiki. Unlike many technical writing environments where specific details are included of what was changed, the wiki revision history need not be as verbose. Listing the date of the revisions and the name of each the person creates a nominal revision history and attribution trail. Something like this:

first wiki posting date, original author: name (original author: unknown, originally posted at www.somewebsite.com)
revision date, revised by: name
revision date, revised by: name
revision date, revised by: name

There is no need to play the copyright game. Simply attribute authorship, both original and editorial.

A couple of questions ...

----------

Does the dokuwiki implementation permit a visitor to suggest changes to an article?

That is, I may read an article that I believe contains errors or can be improved. If my knowledge of the subject is not as great as the original author(s) I would hesitate to edit the article and potentially inject errors into it. But I would still like to see the article corrected/improved if I am correct.

I may not want to register just to make a few suggestions if I don't plan on writing articles for the site.

I may want to simply contact the author/owner/maintainer for their review of my corrections/suggestions. As a non registered visitor to the wiki is there a mechanism to do this? If the current version of the article has been edited by 20 different people over the last couple of years who would be contacted to review my suggestions and make the change? Would such a suggestion for change be sent to the editorial staff to deal with?

-----------

Some of the earlier posts in this thread suggested article ownership so that information could be updated or linked to different versions of Slackware. The idea being that authors would modify/update their articles to fit any changes with new versions of Slackware.

Will such a mechanism exist in the currently considered system?

Will I be able to find a How-To article on configuring wireless networking in Slackware version 12.0 versus Slackware 15.1? How will an article be associated with a Slackware release? Or won't it?

Will any Slackware release dependent knowledge/instructions simply have to be incorporated in the wording of all articles?

------------

These are honest questions, not criticisms, about this Slackware documentation environment being built. Improvements in Linux documentation are always welcome by those seeking information (all of us).

Yes, that is what the "discussion" tab above each page is for. The discussion or "talk" page is open to guests and allows you to comment on the associated article.

I also would encourage people with a Wiki account to create a user page for themselves so that people can directly comment on an author instead of an article.

Also note that the Wiki knows a subscription mechanism - each page has a "manage subscriptions" tab so you can subscribe to a page and get emailed with every update. However, this feature is reserved for people with an account on the wiki.


I would like to see that an article has a footer which describes on what version(s) of Slackware it was "tested". We should use the tag mechanism for that. Something like somewhere inside the article will add a footer with "slackware 13.37" and "slackware 14.0" as tag links which will lead to the TOC page listing all pages containing that same tag.

I added a tag as example here: http://docs.slackware.com/security:inetd . Try following the tag link.

Eric

Is this ability for guest to make entries on the discussion page currently enabled on the site?

I had accessed the tab but couldn't figure out how to make an entry. Apparently I need some hand holding on this simple process.

Thanks.