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All that is great TILL you actually do your diligence, find something on the wiki, use that as a source of truth and it backfires because there was something so

All that is great TILL you actually do your diligence, find something on the wiki, use that as a source of truth and it backfires because there was something somewhere in some group that you posted. The point being just like it is the responsibility of the searcher to put in the effort to look before asking, it is the responsibility of the person writing documents to make sure they stay up to date.

theamk 5y ago
Depends on what exactly "backfires" means. If the procedure seems to work, but instead of creating a server, deletes all data, then yes, the page's author should have fixed it. One should not leave dangerous advice around. (But in general, relying on documentation to avoid dangerous steps is a bad idea in general. If script is deprecated, instead of editing wiki, change the script itself to "print("deprecated, see ..."); exit(1);") If the procedure cannot be executed because the script was renamed, or because backend was taken down, or because it fails loudly in the first step, then it's OK to keep wiki out of date. Sure, it was not useful, but at least it gives some info. And of course in case of doubt, you can always ask the original author: "Hey, I am trying to do X, is procedure on wiki page Y up to date?" -- those kinds of questions are much, much nicer than generic "Where is the docs" question.