7 ms·
MDN is a Wiki. Everybody can contribute.
by uallo 6y ago
MDN is a Wiki. Everybody can contribute.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoDoesn't mean everybody will. Wikipedia is a weird special-case. I've contributed once to MDN, ever, and I use it all the time.
- emidln 6y agoAlso if the team that was supporting it is gone, will the deployment just bit rot and die?
- dhimes 6y agoI'm not even sure I want everyone contributing, at least not without some pruning.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoSparse documentation is better than wrong documentation.
- detaro 6y agoBut e.g. Google teams working on web specs do at least. But I don't have data how the contributions are split, and maintenance is of course a concern.
- Hamuko 6y ago>Wikipedia is a weird special-case. Is it? https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-...
- Earwig 6y agoThis is the nature of any community platform [0]. Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them, and aren't interested in becoming heavily active. I don't see Wikipedia as special in this case, it's just so large that the 1% has enough critical mass to maintain it (well, mostly). 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- Hamuko 6y ago>Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them Wikipedia makes this very difficult as well. I had to submit a small update to sales numbers for the best-selling video game franchises of all time THREE times because two separate admins reverted my edits for the most stupid reasons possible. Then they had some hand-wringing about the lack of sources (even though most of the data there wasn't sourced any better) before they stubbornly decided to stop reverting my edits. A less stubborn person would've given up editing Wikipedia after the first or even the second reversion.
- xanderstrike 6y agoI've never come across a page on MDN I felt I could contribute to since it's so complete, but if I were to come across out of date docs I absolutely would. I imagine it's similar for a lot of folks.
- sireat 6y agoMDN has some Python tutorials that are of lesser quality than HTML,CSS,JS MDN docs. Those could use some work.
- olmideso 6y agoUsually there are only a handful percents of overall users who actually create content compared to "read-only" users. There is nothing special about wikipedia, the same thing applies for sites like youtube,reddit, etc. The same will apply for MDN as well, so if you haven't contributed there, this doesn't mean that nobody will.
- brundolf 6y agoIs the source data openly available, though? You can't exactly "fork" a wiki, normally. I'm concerned lots of crucial knowledge would be lost if Mozilla decided not to host it any more.
- detaro 6y agoMany wikis, MDN included, have all content under an open license, and even run open-source software, and thus can be forked if necessary.
- brundolf 6y agoBut is the content made readily available in the original markup (wiki markup, markdown, whatever), or would you have to scrape everything from the website? Wiki content is normally stored in a database, and presumably that database isn't just open to the world to query directly
- detaro 6y agoMany wikis have open APIs (e.g. mediawiki instances typically do). Not sure about MDNs custom thing, but scraping is always an alternative - or even working off one of the HTML dumps available for offline use (although loosing history and original format sucks).
- brundolf 6y agoTheoretically since you can edit the original-format content from the website, you could scrape it from the website. I'm just wondering if this is something anybody is thinking about/working on.