How did you improve the wiki today?

Julius2 · 2010-11-23 01:18:56

I've noticed that, while the Arch Wiki has some very good and very active editors, it doesn't have many of them and they simply cannot do much more than fix what they've already got. Other than new translations, merges, and formatting fixes, there isn't much going on and, more importantly, not much new content being added. This seems to be because the same people edit the wiki day in, day out (no offense to our regular editors) and, of course, have a limited area of subjects they are comfortable with. To encourage new users or even old ones in redoubling their efforts, I thought that this "bragging thread" might be a good idea. The idea is simple: just create a short post in reply to this stating any contributions you have made to the wiki or even contributions you are planning to make. The reasons for this are many:

It will help to encourage other people by seeing the volume of work being done.
You and others can learn from it by discussing any difficulties you have.
It is a good way of keeping track of where the general trend of work is going, and having people talk about their ideas in their own words is much more useful than manically checking and re-checking the "Recent changes" page.
Most importantly, it gives you an excuse to brag about your work.

If you are new to editing the Arch Wiki or wikis in general, here are some documents that could help you:

Help:Editing -- general Arch Wiki editing guide
Writing Article Introductions -- guide on writing article introductions
Writing Article Overviews -- guide on writing article overviews for summaries
ArchWiki Cheatsheet -- a useful cheatsheet for various formatting and style options

If you are unsure about where to start, the list of "Request" categories might be a fertile ground for improvements.

Now that you have everything you need to know, get editing, and don't forget to tell us all about it. Just a few words or a note is fine.

Shapeshifter · 2010-11-23 01:35:24

So a while back, I bought an SSD and noticed there wasn't a wiki entry on that topic. So I started one, shared what I had learned from various sources on the net, and TADA

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD

was born.

Then it got hijacked by other people who knew more about the topic than me....

And it was good!

Now every arch user knows what to do after buying an SDD.

Go out there and start some wiki articles. Share your knowledge, even if it might not be all-encompassing. Others will pick up what you created and improve upon it. If it is not started, it cannot grow!

pyther · 2010-11-23 03:26:04

Well my adventure started out when I read's Pierre's "Boot loaders in core/base" email on arch-dev-public. He had mentioned this "new" (well to me) bootloader called Syslinux/Extlinux. I went off to look on how to install it and was surprised to find an article in the wiki. Thanks, brain0! The wiki was helpful but some parts weren't very clear.

After doing some research, I put what I learned in the wiki. I then wanted to learn more about how Syslinux actually worked. So I joined #syslinux @ freenode.net and the nice devs and users helped me understand. This lead to the creation of "Syslinux Boot Process" section in the wiki. Anyways, I would go on and tell you about my story with the Syslinux wiki page but no one cares. Simply, I reorganized and decided to add a Troubleshooting section.

I encourage everyone to give Syslinux a try and then improve the wiki article how they see fit.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syslinux

Julius2 · 2010-11-23 03:45:43

To contribute to my own thread, I spent an hour or so today flagging a few articles for merging, adding a summary to the Thunderbird article, and using the keypress wiki tag ( {{Keypress|text}} ) to make the key combinations for basic dwm usage stand out.

vinhsynd · 2010-11-23 06:40:16

Skirted the heavy lifting and instead updated using Keyfiles for LUKS - won't really be satisfied until I get the Swap Partition section in a workable state.

fsckd · 2010-11-23 07:25:35

I helped with the initial construction of the article on burg. Just now I went back and added keypress tags. There is need of more touching up of that article.

Allan · 2010-11-23 07:42:49

I saw my name spelt wrong and fixed it... so a vanity correction!

toad · 2010-11-23 09:03:03

Just a bit of editing here or there plus rather hardware specific stuff. Every proud owner of an older Thinkpad which does not have hardware battery control can now convince it that it does. Another entry is about disabling the clearing of boot messages (it still bugs me that there is no log for that and I don't know where to start creating one!).

But in general just additions to already existing stuff - whenever I notice something that is cool and not covered I try to put it in the wiki. Thing is, my box is running so beautifully these days that I don't need to tinker...

dyscoria · 2010-11-23 10:11:34

Contributed the TOMOYO Linux article, but basically it was so that there was somewhere convenient to put all my links

SanskritFritz · 2010-11-23 12:51:52

That thread is a good idea, I suddenly felt to contribute again
I have had some small corrections and additions in the wiki over time, most notably in the Newcomers Guide (hmm I was the one who nuked it by editing the whole page), Arch Based Distributions, AUR Helpers, and Fish.
I have started to follow fish development more closely, so I added a whole section about the current state of develpment to the fish page.

(It does feel good to brag about it)

Julius2 · 2010-11-23 14:28:19

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far, I highly encourage you to keep updating the thread with any meaningful changes (i.e., anything more substantial than changing "teh" to "the"). Even just small formatting fixes might provide information to people reading this thread about good formatting practices. There are also lots of really clever things that you won't see in any editing guides or the cheat sheet. For instance, the keypress tag: {{Keypress|Text}} .

Other examples of good things people never do include:

Adding a summary (it can be a valuable resource for someone just trying to learn about the content of the page and can contain links to useful information).
Using the AUR package tag (f.e. {{Package AUR|broken aur package}} ), which dynamically creates a link to the page for an AUR package.
The note tag (f.e. {{Note|The only useful information on this page.}} ). Using the note tag for a note is a good way of making sure that people will notice it if they are just skimming the page.
By that token, you should also use the warning tag when you have something possibly critical to say about a possible danger (f.e. {{Warning|This fix may make your desktop eat your children.}}
Another good tag is the "tip" tag (f.e. {{Tip|Something copied verbatim from a technical blog.}} ).
Overusing headers. Yes, this is a good thing. Like XML and violence, if they aren't working, you aren't using enough. The table of contents is a valuable navigation tool, and adding even fairly redundant headers can be something that a reader might find useful.

These things are useful for providing valuable information to the reader who, again, might just be skimming the article. Very few people are going to have an in-depth scan of a page consisting of few headers or anything breaking the page up and nothing but miles of block paragraphs, simply on the off chance that it might help to solve their problem. Most people will try to use the table of contents to go directly to whatever section might help them, then will skim through looking for code blocks, tips, notes, warnings, etc., to see if that information is valuable. Once they've ascertained that, they will probably read in more depth.

Remember, it's better to over-format a page than to under-format. One of the advantages of the Arch Wiki (and wikis in general) is their easy readability -- they're good for someone who might just be skimming along looking for an easy fix or relevant information.

madeye · 2010-11-23 18:53:37

After reading all the comments on my article on the rolling release Ezine I decided to turn it into a wiki page, so that we all can add to it and correct any errors there may be.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Se … Arch_Linux

I have more articles planned, but have preciously little time at the moment. That's the life of service engineer traveling the world

toad · 2010-11-23 23:37:18

@ madeye

much appreciated

Julius2 · 2010-11-24 03:39:49

madeye wrote:

After reading all the comments on my article on the rolling release Ezine I decided to turn it into a wiki page, so that we all can add to it and correct any errors there may be.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Se … Arch_Linux

I have more articles planned, but have preciously little time at the moment. That's the life of service engineer traveling the world

... And I made a few fixes. Nothing earth-shattering, just a formatting fix and a recommended page move (which you obviously undertook) to "Securing Arch Linux" (original was "Securing arch linux"). Call me a stickler for stuff like this, but whether or not the page name is capitalized can hugely influence the reader's impression of the quality of the contents. In short, if you spell anything right, it should be the page name.

I hope to see more contributions from you in the future. Don't forget to talk about them here!

jasonwryan · 2010-11-26 22:17:51

I just added Vimcasts to the Resources section of the Vim page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vim#Resources

These are a fantastic series of screencasts (in .ogg) for anyone learning Vim, or for experienced users to find new ways of utilizing the awesome power of Vim.

filam · 2010-12-06 15:12:20

Thanks for the post Jason, I wouldn't have noticed that addition to the Wiki otherwise.

Vimcasts is a great resource. I've already watched the first five screencasts and added the OGG RSS feed to my reader.

tzervo · 2010-12-13 14:19:54

Just added the tmux/urlview tip in the tmux page. I am gathering experience and knowledge to contribute more in the future, but for now thats it

crouse · 2010-12-15 05:23:32

Started a page on sqlite3

nixpunk · 2010-12-15 05:37:52

Allan wrote:

I saw my name spelt wrong and fixed it... so a vanity correction!

Alien, what are you talking about?

skodabenz · 2010-12-20 17:04:21

Firstly, thanks for the bragging rights without a feeling of guilt. I wrote 2 wiki articles https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … _Interface and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GU … tion_Table (of course with changes by few others) - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97541 .

SanskritFritz · 2010-12-24 22:21:03

I started this page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Parental_Control
Please help improving it!

Gen2ly · 2010-12-25 04:01:43

Good idea for a thread (hmm... I have to say that ). I enjoy contributing to the wiki though lately I've had to make time to do so. I created the System Restore from Configurations page though I'm not sure how many people use it. Still good experience and I don't care how many people read it .

SanskritFritz · 2010-12-25 21:02:21

Gen2ly wrote:

Good idea for a thread (hmm... I have to say that ). I enjoy contributing to the wiki though lately I've had to make time to do so. I created the System Restore from Configurations page though I'm not sure how many people use it. Still good experience and I don't care how many people read it .

Nice article, thanks!

Möller · 2010-12-31 16:24:34

I started an ELinks-article on the wiki yesterday, unfortunately it is far from done. Although my knowledge about it is limited, I sincerely hope others will contribute and use one of the most awesome browsers known to mankind. With 256-colors the Arch Linux forum looks pretty darn good!

ANOKNUSA · 2010-12-31 21:54:46

Well, I actually did it last weekend, but I added notes on using ASCII art, cowsay and fortunes to the article on colored bash prompts. Just a little extra bling for folks out there. I plan fleshing out the KDE article with tips on window tiling, effects, KRunner, etc. since--let's be honest--KDE's official documentation is severely lacking...

Arch Linux

#1 2010-11-23 01:18:56

How did you improve the wiki today?

#2 2010-11-23 01:35:24

Re: How did you improve the wiki today?

#3 2010-11-23 03:26:04

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#4 2010-11-23 03:45:43

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#5 2010-11-23 06:40:16

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#6 2010-11-23 07:25:35

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#7 2010-11-23 07:42:49

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#8 2010-11-23 09:03:03

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#9 2010-11-23 10:11:34

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#10 2010-11-23 12:51:52

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#11 2010-11-23 14:28:19

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#12 2010-11-23 18:53:37

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