Re: Setting up a wiki for GNU Project volunteers?

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 04:00:27PM +0000, Brandon Invergo wrote:
> Unless that decision changes, any wiki discussed here is necessarily
> unofficial and any proposed content is in no way implicitly endorsed or
> supported by the GNU Project.

I think we should distinguish two kinds of documents:
- "official" communication from the GNU project to the outer, non-GNU world;
  this should go through some documented process of approval, or it should
  in any case be documented who has the right to modify which documents,
  web pages and so on;
- "official" internal documents, but that bind GNU stakeholders, such as
  the maintainers' guide, the coding standards, and so on; there should also
  be a clear process for modifying these;
- working spaces internal to the GNU project, to which only GNU stakeholders
  have writing access, but that should nevertheless operate under public
  scrutiny.
(Does anybody remember the joke about people understanding binary? ;-))

Here we are talking about the latter, and it should be clear that the
content of such working spaces is not (or not yet) endorsed by the
GNU project. So could using a subdomain solve the problem? For instance,
wiki.stakeholders.gnu.org, wiki.developers.gnu.org or something similar?
  
> Personally, I've found that in most cases wikis are an inefficient means
> of active collaboration and discussion

That is a good, second question. Our recent efforts to work on a GNU Social
Contract have shown that (unsurprisingly) version control by e-mail is also
not efficient for collaboratively constructing a document. I would be happy
to try out a wiki, since it can hardly be worse. Or maybe a pad? Or simply
a git repository for registering changes, which could be discussed on this
mailing list? In any case, I think we should try to implement a collaborative
work space of some form; and maybe experiment with different ones until we
have a satisfying solution.

Andreas