[LEDE-DEV] Documentation for router support means the famous Table of Hardware

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Schultz <eschultz at prplfoundation.org> writes:

Eric> I think the idea of having the hardware support documentation
Eric> managed by experts is a good idea. Non-experts can, and should,
Eric> have plenty of areas to contribute but I don't see this area as
Eric> one of them.

I want to push back on this a little bit.  Jimmy Wales had similar
ideas, once upon a time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia), and
he was proven wrong, empirically.  The beauty of wikis is that people
are empowered to contribute what they know.  Without that empowerment,
the vehicles for sharing what they know is much more scattered and
diffused.  Yes, wikis are a shit storm of inconsistency.  If people want
more consistency what is really needed is people to garden the manure
into neat rows.  I can't begin to count the vast utility I have derived
from the steaming heaps of barely coherent crap that has been dumped
into OpenWrt wiki.  If you close that vehicle off, what you will end up
with is a whole lot of nothing, which I argue is vastly worse.

If you want something that's pretty, hire someone to watch RecentChanges
and clean stuff up.  If the experts had the time and raw information to
do it, we wouldn't be talking about this.  The reality is that they
don't.  I argue for letting the rabble continue to contribute as they
can.  If you don't like what it looks like, that discomfort is trying to
tell you what to do next: click the edit button and make it better.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net