Wiki.nixos.org is now live

payas · April 2, 2024, 6:30pm

Oh may $DEITY bless your kind soul! Thank you!

kvtb · April 2, 2024, 9:24pm

Good there is an official wiki, but is it possible to let the old unofficial wiki NixOS Wiki point to the new one?

Because now we have two wikis with the same content, but people are still editing the old wiki so they get out of sync. Better to have one single source of ‘truth’ so random visitors do not get confused

RaitoBezarius · April 2, 2024, 11:27pm

Original owner of old wiki does not want to cooperate.

chrism · April 3, 2024, 5:25am

I loathe making suggestions I’m unable to help with myself, but I think it might go a long way to visually distinguish the new wiki’s default look from the old wiki’s default look. Right now, the casual googler could be forgiven for mistaking them as the same. This might include changing the favicon.

tobiasBora · April 3, 2024, 10:49am

That’s great, but I’m not sure to follow exactly what’s going on here:

~~What’s the difference between this wiki and the old wiki? Wasn’t it already somewhat official? Has doc been transferred from the old one to the new one? Why not just keep the old wiki?~~ Ok, I misread the above messages, seems like the old one was not official.
What’s happening with the old wiki? Is it going to be removed? Is there any plan to redirect pages and/or print a warning message that it is obsolete and that users should instead move to this new wiki? I can already see some divergences between Python - NixOS Wiki and Python - NixOS Wiki and I would expect users to be really confused with two wiki at the same time. Ok, I misread the above messages, seems like the owner of the old wiki does not want to cooperate (weird). Should we maybe at least write at the top of the current wiki page a note like This is the new official wiki, not to be confused with the older unnoficial wiki https://nixos.wiki/?
Is NixOs (finally!) officially recommending to write documentation to the wiki? (the old instructions where more like “remove anything from the wiki to move it to the manual”).

fricklerhandwerk · April 3, 2024, 10:56am

This is the first line on the front page:

This is the official NixOS Wiki. It contains NixOS user guides, configuration examples, and troubleshooting tips.

Since no one really objected to what I argued for, I updated a few pages to be more precise on the role of the Wiki: NixOS Wiki:Contributing - NixOS Wiki

I’ll try to find time to update the instructions on nix.dev and make another sweep over the Wiki, so it’s all roughly aligned.

lassulus · April 3, 2024, 11:21am

since the question keeps appearing of why we have a new wiki, we added a section to the FAQ: FAQ - NixOS Wiki?

tobiasBora · April 3, 2024, 12:31pm

I was more thinking about a message above any page (let’s be honest, users just open the page they want to read and that’s it), and also adding (unlike nixos.wiki) would make it clear that nixos.wiki is not official (for some time I thought both were pointing to the same content). Adding a link to the FAQ may help people to understand why this change has been done as well.

Awesome!

MikulasVanousek · April 3, 2024, 8:15pm

If I understand it correctly, if someone contributes to the old Wiki today (after the fork), the changes will never be reflected in the new Wiki. Is this the case?

RaitoBezarius · April 3, 2024, 8:28pm

This is the right understanding yes.

MikulasVanousek · April 3, 2024, 8:39pm

First, let me emphasize that I completely agree we need a new Wiki. The new Wikimedia software you have running is a big upgrade and I can’t wait to use it more. Thank you for your work.

That being said, I think starting the wiki without getting rid of the old one will backfire terribly. The most active members of the community read the discourse, and they will start using the new Wiki straight away. But many people will have never heard of the new wiki. The old wiki will have better SEO in the months or years to come. This will lead many people to use the old wiki. I landed on the old wiki just the other day when Googling julia nixos. I made some edits and felt like I made a difference.

Ultimately, having two wikis will lead to a fork, where part of the community is using the old wiki and part of the community will use the new wiki. Those two versions will slowly drift apart. In a year, much valuable information will be in the old wiki only. This will make getting rid of it so much more difficult, as you would have to either merge it all manually or throw away useful documentation. We can’t afford to make improving documentation harder, as it is the lack of great documentation is arguably one of the biggest disadvantages of our beloved distro.

Of course, getting rid of the old wiki will not be easy, but I propose you lock the modification of the new wiki until we manage that. I say that being as excited about the new wiki as anyone, but I don’t think the split in community documentation that is essentially guaranteed to happen is worth it.

As the old admin is uncooperative, we need to think creatively about how to archive the old wiki. Unfortunately, Nix or NixOS are registered trademarks yet. If that happened, the NixOS Foundation would have the legal right to repossess the domain name nixos.wiki.

ShalokShalom · April 3, 2024, 9:12pm

I do agree with a lot of your points, and have brought them into the conversation, on the Matrix channels, before.

I personally think, it is most important to provide a good way to consult the new Wiki, without relying on search engines. The obvious solution to that seems, to me at last, that we provide solutions to integrate the new Wiki into the browsers directly.

I am about to write a guide.

ShalokShalom · April 3, 2024, 9:31pm

For Firefox:

Open https://wiki.nixos.org/
Right click into the address bar and select "Add NixOS Wiki (en)

Trigger the search with:

Click into the address bar or select it with Ctrl+L
Enter “wiki” and hit “tab”
Enter the search string

The second step of the actual search might interfere with other search engines, who contain the word Wiki. Adjust accordingly.

claes · April 3, 2024, 9:32pm

My 2c: having multiple competing wikis may appear as a waste of resources, splitting attention, unneccessary, confusing and so on. But in the end, it may not be that big of a deal. If both evolves, remain accurate, provide value, it can also be benefical for the NixOS wider community. Competition can be good also.

I would not advise to try to strangle the domain from the other wiki through legal means. Instead, try to make the new wiki as good as possible. I like it, it is easy to work with and will form a good foundation.

ShalokShalom · April 3, 2024, 9:39pm

For Brave:

Open brave://settings/searchEngines

Click on Add

Enter https://wiki.nixos.org/w/index.php?search=%s in the third line.
The second line determines with which keyword you can trigger the search.

Again, with a click in the URL bar (or Ctrl+L) and typing the provided keyword (wiki in this case), plus confirming it with the tab key, can you quickly reach the Wiki.

This is important, to improve the SEO!

RaitoBezarius · April 3, 2024, 9:55pm

How much energy shall be invested for an unknown result that cannot be measured in terms of effectiveness? People are free to choose how they spend their time, I think.

I prefer to build something new and good rather than spending time on enforcement and this sort of stuff, it’s not how I want to spend my time.

MikulasVanousek · April 4, 2024, 7:08am

I like your optimism, I hope time will prove you right.

MikulasVanousek · April 4, 2024, 7:27am

Perhaps I should start a new thread, but I have long had an idea for an enhancement of the wiki. This feature could also be used to effectively promote the new official wiki over the old unofficial wiki.

I think it would be very neat to have the ability to declare a given article is about a specific package (or packages) in Nixpkgs.

This could facilitate integration with search.nixos.org. Besides Source and Homepage, there could be a link to an article about a package, if there is one on the wiki.

This would be a great place to mention differences between versions of packages. For example, for the Julia language has the following versions of packages:

julia
julia-bin
julia-lts
julia_18
julia_18-bin

All these point to the same home page. You might think the difference between all these packages is immediately obvious from the names, but there is a more detailed description on the wiki. It would be neat to immediately see that a wiki article exists about these packages.

lassulus · April 4, 2024, 8:30am

maybe a new meta attribute inside the package would be good for that?

tobiasBora · April 4, 2024, 8:35am

Love the idea for linking packages to wiki pages!

Regarding the issue of having two wiki, why can’t we simply add in front of all (or most since the admin will likely not allow us to run a script) pages a warning with a redirection to the new wiki? I just started with the python page:

This should also help with SEO, creating more links to the official wiki page.

For people interested, you can just copy/paste this text and change the URL to provide a proper redirection (or find it later by opening an already modified page like the Python’s one and clicking the source with “Edit”):

{{warning|1=The new official [https://wiki.nixos.org/ NixOs wiki] should now be preferred over this possibly outdated [https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_is_there_a_new_wiki?_What_is_with_nixos.wiki? unofficial] page. We therefore recommend you to check instead https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Python.}}