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2022-07-04.log

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<Hagfish>it's always easier to volunteer for a known amount of work than an unknown amount :)
<oriansj>very true
<Hagfish>if you can keep track of how much time the maintenance takes up, people won't feel they are taking on more than they can safely commit to
<oriansj>fair
<Hagfish>and once something is set up and in use, people can appreciate the value of it more
<oriansj>or ultimately decide that a git repo of the contents is more valuable than a hosted service
<Hagfish>yeah, such a comparison becomes more concrete
<oriansj>although that does require me to do a great deal more of the decision making but I guess it was inevitable
<oriansj>the unavoidable downside of who does decides. Sometimes you have to be the one making the choices
<oriansj>especially one you don't know the correct solution and they all seem about the same in terms of effort and results
<oriansj>like I know that we have a wiki and the repeated risk of it being deleted is annoying and I know how to solve that on a technical level but I also know it isn't something I benefit from directly as much as new people and that is why it has value. I guess I was hoping for some hard perspective of the people less familiar with everything than I am.
<oriansj>aka what do the new people here think and to tell me what i am getting right and wrong.
<Hagfish>there are probably people who see the wiki and think "that's interesting", and then move on
<Hagfish>i don't know if we should be optimising for that use case
<Hagfish>i'm just thinking about how survivorship bias affects things
<Hagfish>did everyone who ended up contributing use the wiki at some point?
<oriansj>indeed, why the problem of what I am wrong about is so important
<Hagfish>like you say, the wiki is most valuable to the people least able to contribute to it
<Hagfish>wouldn't it be possible to make the wiki content be a sub-section of some other group's wiki?
<oriansj>and unfortunately only those on matrix or IRC are here to communicate, which does filter out some people by default
<Hagfish>i don't think there's any inherent problem in hosting two disparate wikis on the same instance
<Hagfish>yeah
<Hagfish>i guess the limiting factors are you can only have one front page, and some search terms would appear in search results from each section, diluting the signal
<oriansj>and curation can be used to increase the purity of the signal
<oriansj>much like the gentoo and arch wikis being limited contribution but very useful
<Hagfish>do we have connections to the people behind the OSDev wiki?
<oriansj>not much as far as i know
<Hagfish>it might be worth reaching out to them
<Hagfish>presumably it is possible to limit accounts to only be able to edit certain pages
<Hagfish>so they could limit the blast radius of any signups they allow
<oriansj>so your thought is instead of us hosting the wiki content, we get it into the OSDev wiki?
<oriansj>interesting
<Hagfish>it seems like a possibility
<Hagfish>it might also help that community, or attract people from it
<Hagfish>although we shouldn't think of it in terms of poaching users across
<oriansj>if they are open to such cooperation.
<Hagfish>yeah, it would obviously have to be done transparently, not trying to sneak a load of edits without telling them :)
<oriansj>true and they might not want a course on creating programming languages on their OS wiki
<oriansj>I wonder if there are any programming language creation communities that might find our work directly helpful
<Hagfish>there's an esolang wiki, isn't there?
<oriansj>don't know, never heard of it before
<Hagfish> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page
<Hagfish> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bootstrapping
<Hagfish>"Please help us by adding some more information."
<Hagfish>heh, be careful what you wish for :)
<oriansj>lol
<oriansj>and they are on #esolangs on Libera.Chat so I guess I should go say hi
<oriansj>you can checkout their IRC logs here: https://logs.esolangs.org/libera-esolangs/
<oriansj>well I added hex0, hex1, hex2, M0 and cc_* to the esolangs wiki
<oriansj>Hagfish: the classic quote I believe is "Be careful what you wish for; because the Devil answers prayers with a yes when God says no and for the same reasons."
<oriansj>and a very light introduction was added, lets see how they react
<oriansj>net reaction == null
***Hagfish_ is now known as Hagfish
<oriansj>So we could probably mirror some info there without much trouble but it would result in our info being buried
<Hagfish>i don't know if buried is the right word
<Hagfish>side-lined?
<Hagfish>ghettoised?
<Hagfish>as long as people who need it can find it, it doesn't matter if irrelevant stuff is a few clicks away
<Hagfish>the whole internet is a few clicks away :)
<Hagfish>you could have a static home/intro page somewhere else, outside of the wiki instance, just to explain the situation or get people off to a good start
<oriansj>it is the "as long as people who need it can find it" bit that is what concerns me
<Hagfish>yeah, that's difficult to predict
<oriansj>hence the idea of a centralized wiki that is easy to mirror/clone and contains everything that might be helpful (such as copies of videos of the talks and the tarballs needed)
<oriansj>with ftp/rsync support of the bigger files
<Hagfish>being able to clone a local copy of all the necessary documentation sounds valuable
<Hagfish>video hosting has different requirements to wiki hosting
<oriansj>and reading up on the J2 makes me wonder if I should do a port for stage0 as well (only the delay slot looks annoying)
<oriansj>Hagfish: not if we treat them just like files
<stikonas[m]>What is J2?
<muurkha>a clonable/mirrorable Wiki would be great
<muurkha>GitLab and GitHub have that as a builtin feature. not sure about SourceHut, Gogs, and Gitea
<muurkha>esolangs wiki sounds great
<unmatched-paren>muurkha: man.sr.ht provides a wiki service
<unmatched-paren>fairly sure gogs/gitea don't provide one
<unmatched-paren>eg https://git.sr.ht/~whereiseveryone/wiki and https://man.sr.ht/~whereiseveryone/wiki/
<muurkha>unmatched-paren: looks like you can clone their wikis over git too: https://man.sr.ht/man.sr.ht/
<muurkha>in CommonMark, which is a pretty decent variant of Markdown
<unmatched-paren>yeah, they're basically just git repos with Markdown files in them that are rendered to man.sr.ht/~blah/blah when you push a commit
<muurkha>yeah, same as gh/gl