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

[Karl Palsson]

Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
>> [on making documentation changes only via pull requests]
>> 
> 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.

I strongly support this. Doing documentation changes via git
pulls only is a _major_ obstacle. Vanishingly few people will
ever do minor corrections, and so few people already write major
new articles. And that's _before_ you find these magical
"reviewer" people to review documentation pulls!

I fully recognise that not all the information in the openwrt
wiki is correct or up to date, but that's why it has history
annotations saying when it was written, and with your reading
glasses on, you can get real useful information there, even if
it's often incomplete, or sometimes slightly wrong, or outdated.
People should be encouraged to edit more freely, not putting up
more steps in the way.

Sincerely,
Karl Palsson
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