what belongs on the wiki

[John W. Eaton]

What things are appropriate for the wiki and what should be documented
in the Octave manual?

I would like to limit the wiki to transient items, or frequently asked
questions.  If something is already documented elsewhere (the Octave
manual, other GNU project manuals, or other web site) then I think we
should link to those sources rather than duplicating information on
the wiki.  Having the information in two places requires more work to
maintain and makes it much more likely that there will be
inconsistencies that will confuse people.

Here are two examples of what we should be doing on the wiki when
information is available from another source:

  
http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#How_does_Octave_solve_linear_systems.3F

  
http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=Enable_large_arrays:_Build_octave_such_that_it_can_use_arrays_larger_than_2Gb.

Each of these provides a bit of information directly then points to
another source for details.

As an example of what we should try to avoid, I noticed today that the
following page copies much of what I recently wrote for the Octave
manual about dependencies.

  http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=Build_from_source

Once Octave 3.6.0 is released, the new version of the manual will be
on the web, so it seems better to me to wait until then and link to
the installation chapter of the manual instead of wasting a lot of
effort duplicating the contents of the manual on the wiki.

How can we get this message out to the people who are editing the
wiki?

Comments?

jwe