Wouldn’t it be possible to redirect nixos.wiki to wiki.nixos.org (natively, without any additional client-side fluff)?
The maintainer/owner of the domain didn’t agree to join forces a year, not 2 years ago and not 3 years ago, why do you think they would today?
The problem is not the nix foundation or community. It is the individual sitting on the domain.
15 Likes
Wasn’t aware of this, are there any public discussion about it elsewhere? And who is the owner?
2 Likes
Just a tip, if you want to remove the nixos.wiki results from your ddgo/bing searches, add this snippet to your ublock origin custom filters:
! Remove nixos.wiki from results
duckduckgo.com,bing.com##a[href*="nixos.wiki"]:upward(li):remove()
3 Likes
As nixos is now a registered trademark woldn’t it be possible to force the domain transfer to the nixos foundation?
My understanding of trademarks is that you need to defend them or you lose it. If the foundation doesn’t try to get control of the domain i think that there is the possibility of losing it. (I am not a lawyer)
1 Like
I found this page on icann Trademark Infringement - If you feel someone is using your trademark in a domain name
1 Like
My trademark idea was already discussed on github: Registering the NixOS Trademark · Issue #46 · NixOS/foundation · GitHub
tldr: it doesn’t work retroactively. As the site is older than the trademark it doesn’t apply.
6 Likes
Perhaps in some future, but not now.
The maintainer of nixos.wiki is fadenb.
What is possible is to keep content in sync.
This is what we should focus on: quality of documentation.
This is a simplistic view from one side.
The wikis have a history (only preserved on nixos.wiki) that is the reason why there are two wikis today. This history has epochs, and the problem you’re describing happened in January 2024, when wiki.nixos.org was revived and fadenb did not want to shut down nixos.wiki, or transfer ownership, or whatever the idea was, as a consequence.
As much as I compare NixOS with The Borg Collective (my personal favorite), others have said that NixOS must surely be The Federation. While this is a matter of perspective, fadenb should not be ostracized for not agreeing to be assimilated.
He ran the unofficial wiki for years after the official one was killed.
Now that it’s revived, he still runs it. There is nothing wrong with that.
If you want to improve the quality of documentation, we have two wikis to tend to.
I’ll be posting a plan I’ve got brewing for that – if you’re interested, I will be at the documentation team meeting on Wednesday.
I don’t recommend this for two reasons:
- It is a sign of cognitive dissonance: it doesn’t solve any problems long-term.
- nixos.wiki os not obviously worse than wiki.nixos.org – both still receive updates, not the same ones. So each wiki is better and worse than the other in different ways.
As I wrote in the trademark discussion on GitHub:
a trademark for NixOS could help with the transition to the new wiki.
It will not be relevant to the Wiki after all
Not only will it not be relevant, it won’t be possible. Trademarks cannot be used for retroactive takedowns.
All major trademark jurisdictions operate with the concept of “prior use”. So if you were to build a case to legally attack nixos.wiki for using a trademark that existed only years after nixos.wiki was an accepted community site, a lawsuit is entirely non-trivial. Not to mention: A bad idea. Maybe you haven’t been in a lawsuit before. The consequences financially, emotionally and culturally are so damaging that the cost would not justify the intended outcome.
To elaborate: You don’t resolve community disputes with lawsuits.
8 Likes
the FAQ on the new wiki covers this FAQ - Official NixOS Wiki
We tried to address these issues multiple times over multiple years across multiple channels (email, matrix). We never got a direct answer. The last point of contact was made through zimbatm representing the NixOS Foundation, asking the maintainer about possible cooperation on a new wiki. The answer was no. With the old wiki deteriorating and the maintainer unresponsive, forking the content into a new wiki remained the only way forward.
6 Likes
I personally don’t want things like this in the official wiki: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nixos_Woke_Invasion
14 Likes
I was about to bring that one up. It still being up puts the whole site squarely into the bigot corner.
I see they added a disclaimer at the top, which is fun. Doesn’t make it any less damning.
2 Likes
It’s objectively worse, many users were denied access for a time (maybe still are?) due to basically racism. No matter how I look at it, blocking entire countries from access is not an acceptable solution for a prosocial project like NixOS.
It’s also full of garbage articles like https://nixos.wiki/wiki/For_Beginners.
No, that’s actually stupid to maintain the same content in two spaces. As much as I have my own personal thoughts on the (mis)management of the official wiki, I’d still put my efforts there over the dead wiki.
10 Likes
thanks for pointing that out, i didn’t realize we had such completely off-topic nonsense in the other wiki 
3 Likes
This is the cleaned up version. The older version was pretty much a straight-up copy of one of the screeds srid liked to publish on his site.
I just checked and it seems he took the whole side down after his pivot-to-AI in recent months.
Here’s the most recent version I could find in the internet archive: NixOS Woke Invasion – Sridhar Ratnakumar
3 Likes
I’d like to address the cognitive dissonance here:
- The unofficial wiki still works and received ~4 edits in the last month. (That’s fewer edits than the official wiki received today alone, so the ratio has really changed a lot in the last year.)
- Think of the unofficial wiki as a cache that we can’t remove and clutters the search results. Would you rather have a stale cache, or a non-stale cache? And to be fair, for a number of years, after the official wiki was deleted, the unofficial wiki was the primary result, and it still is for a lot of pages.
- The front page is locked and stale. This is a result of the 2024 dispute, and I’m still working on unlocking it.
Wanting to declare the unofficial wiki dead is nothing but an angry witch hunt that won’t deal with the reality that it exists and has differing content. Even though ~4 changes per month is not a lot, that’s real effort by real Nix’ers that doesn’t benefit everyone, and it accumulates over time.
1 Like
Sure, random beginners will stumble upon it and edit it.
And maybe some people who hate the official wiki for whatever reason.
But as a community-maintained platform I would consider that dead, yeah.
Yep, it’s clutter. It only persists because beginners keep linking to it inadvertently. I’d be happy to see it wiped so that we can at least direct beginners to a better-maintained wiki which at the very least has moderation.
Lot of people using this word today who don’t know what it means, hm?
I’m just stating the self-evident fact that an effectively unmoderated* wiki with basically no edits that blocks a 2-digit percentage of our community is dead. (You didn’t address that, so I’m repeating it here.) I don’t need to hunt down something that’s already dead, I’m just looking at its corpse and remarking upon it.
*There is some infra in place to block entire countries, and someone ran a script one time to revert some copypasted vandalism, but no humans are ensuring on an ongoing basis that the content is up to any standard. In fact the dead wiki has no standards. I had multiple people ask me if there were standards and I also tried to find it myself in the past, it just doesn’t exist. The official wiki, OTOH, has Manual of Style - Official NixOS Wiki, and they did (after a fair bit of time, to be sure, but eventually) delete many garbage pages like the aforementioned “For Beginners”.
I don’t understand your personal attachment to the dead wiki, but no one will personally stop you from duplicating all the efforts of the official wiki editors, so have at it if that’s what you believe in.
6 Likes