Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian [LWN subscriber-only content]
The Arch Linux project is especially well-known in the Linux community for two things: its rolling-release model and the quality of the documentation in the ArchWiki. No matter which Linux distribution one uses, the odds are that eventually the ArchWiki's documentation will prove useful. The Debian project recognized this and has sought to improve its own documentation game by inviting ArchWiki maintainers Jakub Klinkovský and Vladimir Lavallade to DebConf25 in Brest, France, to speak about how Arch manages its wiki. The talk has already borne fruit with the launch of an effort to revamp the Debian wiki.
Klinkovský and Lavallade were introduced by Debian developer Thomas Lange, who said that he had the idea to invite the pair to DebConf. Klinkovský said that he had been a maintainer of the wiki since about 2014, and that he is also a package maintainer for Arch Linux. He added that he contributes to many other projects " wherever I can ". For his part, Lavallade said that he has contributed to the wiki since 2021, but he had only recently joined the maintenance team: " I know just enough to be dangerous ."
Lavallade said that the talk was a good opportunity to cross-pollinate with another distribution, and to do some self-reflection on how the wiki team operates. They would explain how the wiki is run using the SWOT analysis format, with a focus on the content and how the maintenance team keeps the quality of pages as high as it can. "SWOT", for those who have been fortunate enough not to have encountered the acronym through corporate meetings, is short for "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats". SWOT analysis is generally used for decision-making processes to help analyze the current state and identify what an organization needs to improve.
ArchWiki:About
The ArchWiki was established in 2004; the project originally used PhpWiki as its backend—but Klinkovský said that it was quickly migrated to MediaWiki, which is still in use today. The wiki maintenance and translation teams were established " about 2010 ". The maintenance team is responsible for the contribution guidelines, style conventions, organization, and anything else that contributors need to know.
Today, the wiki has more than 4,000 topic pages; it has close to 30,000 pages if one counts talk pages, redirects, and help pages. " We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia ", Klinkovský said.
He displayed a slide, part of which is shown below, with graphs showing the number of edits and active users per month. The full set of slides is available online as well.
Since 2006, the wiki has had more than 840,000 edits by more than 86,000 editors; the project is averaging more than 2,000 edits by about 300 active contributors each month. Klinkovský noted that this " used to be quite a larger number ".
Strengths
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