Helpful:About
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Notes to potential editors
Feel free to contribute.
(Just know it might get reformatted:)
There are no real policies you are bound to. If you want some guidelines, take a look at wikipedia's editing policies and rules, they're mostly useful and/or sane.
When you write new pages, add an introduction, but avoid parts that are probably unnecessary. For exameple, consider that someone who searches for something like SSH tunneling probably knows basics about computer networking, so you can give the lowdown on how the tunneling works and what the most likely setups are.
A lot of web(log) articles out there have the tendency to explain so much background they feel they need to quickly skim over a few commands that, yes, work, but don't give the reader any idea of how or why.
In this example, if you feel like elaborating on networking details, you'ld probably want to add that to some networking-related page and reference that instead, so that you can avoid duplicate information (that could also be in places where it is harder to find).
Also, try to be minimal. There are often many side notes you can make that are correct and complete, but don't contribute to general understanding. Consider moving such details to a 'detailed considerations' section, removing it, or even moving it to its own article.
Things to avoid
Nothing here should consist for a noticable part of copy-pasted summaries. Things that are clearly rehashed rather than really understood will probably be commented out or removed until someone gets to writing it up well. Overly formal definitions, dry references consisting mostly of options only the very technical type of person (who can find them anyway) would be interested in.
See also Contributing and editing.
Note that the content is FDL'd, which rougly means "don't add copyrighted text, and note that the content is freely copyable" (see also License comparison)
Why is this here?
You can often explain the gist of something to a friend in a few minutes. It's not a full explanation, not a technical or correct one, but one of the interesting aspects of such discussions is the different levels of abstraction and the need to be minimal:
- "Okay, the reason you want this is ..." <quick description of problem and solution>
- "Currently, this practically works out as..." <instructions> and/or <just the relevant cold hard details>
- "...because..." <current context and assumptions, and comparisons where necessary>
- "But when you think about it, it's just a case of ..." <abstraction that makes it easier to remember>
When you have just one or two of these, it's more confusing than edicational, and somehow it's all too common. Blogs do it a lot, but documentation and even tutorials also do it with some regularity.
Wikipedia also has some problems; a lot of technical pages have random fragments of not-too-correlated (often mathematical) factoids and truisms, and you have to basically know what it wants to say to understand what it's actually saying.
So:
- Wikiing For Snappy Information Assimilation
- Wikiing Against Technically Correct But Not Really Useful Articles Unless You Already Sort Of Understood It Anyway
- Wikiing Against Summaries That Got Rewritten And Rewritten And Got Way Too Abstracted Because Of It
- Wikiing Against Summaries That Are Useful For An Unrealistically Narrow Or A Uselessly Broad Target Group
- Wikiing Against General Information Overload
What sort of things can I expect?
Ideally, useful information of any type.
In practice, this is also entirely useful for:
- Dumping place for quick notes
- Dumping place for fixes for common problems
- Dumping place for things I don't want to unnecessarily think and write up again and again (e.g. code snippets and commands)
- Place to write summaries (that may or may not be oversimplified, read 'wrong', in their early, read 'possibly current,' versions
- Place to dump scribbles from the piles upon piles of paper I have.
Because of this, a good amount of content is written by reading up a bit, writing text with educated guesses, and only verified and cleaned up later.
This means there are a lot of errors in there before someone ends up polishing it, and it's not all marked with (verify) and it doesn't all sound unlikely. Don't blindly trust, particularly when there are stub, unfinished, and other such markers.
For some part I used this for personal notes, formatted so that other people may also use it, or could be with a little polishing. Feel free to add and start other pages in the style described. See Help:Editing when you want to contribute.
Note: while a page is a stub, the strictness/minimalism/structure doesn't apply much yet -- after all, you should be able to research something you didn't know about yet.
Who
Anyone can contribute.
Wiki started, domain owned, and currently all content by a certain scarfboy.
