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From Helpful

If a page here has helped you, cool.

The whole idea is to have information useful for the people actually looking for it.

...which usually means augmenting useful information already out there.

Feel free to dump anything that is useful, pragmatic, and probably in a shape you would have liked to find it yourself (and might like to find when you've forgotten the details in a few months).

Doesn't have to be interesting to everyone, just to someone - probably someone like you.

Augment

There's no point copy-pasting content. If there's a useful resource out there, link to it.

In some cases, just listing a handful of the best links you've found is already very useful. But often enough there's something to add.

When only long explanation exist on a subject, a condensed summary can be nice.

When you mostly see fragmented or scattered notes, a coherent overview can be nice.

When all notes are technical, an intuitive introduction can be nice.

When only entangled cross-referenced RFC-talk exists, the occasional "okay, in practice this is mostly ..." can be nice.

And sometimes it means multiple distinct approaches to the same thing -- some might find one much easier to grasp than another.

Succinct

I think some of the best content on the web is the stuff written out of necessity - like your own notes when learning something, or the few-sentence summary you might give to a friend asking for some introduction.

Succinct is good - as a tendency. I find that my notes are chaotic when I add them - and that most sentences can be halved later, and become easier to read and to skim.

So a mess of information is welcome, just know that it'll get rewritten. If it's useful information it'll stick around. Oh, and good rewriting is also welcome :)

Bootstrap

When faced with something theoretical or just complex, many of us prefer first getting an intuitive bootstrap over the boiled-down summaries.

Even if we'll eventually base our mental models on the boiled down facts and forget the bootstrap.

(I find that writing pages in wikis like this is a good way to do both)

More rambling

See Helpful:About.