The pros and cons of a wiki AppDB

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Sat Mar 7 14:10:13 CST 2009


2009/3/7 Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net>:

> I can think of one possible benefit. There are a lot of apps without maintainers, and there might be users of those apps who would be willing take a few minutes to post bits of useful information in a wiki, but don't want the responsibility of being a maintainer. Sure, they could just post info in a comment, but user comments are buried at the bottom of the page and not in a useful order for finding information quickly. The same goes for comments in test reports--I've found information on needed tweaks buried several reports down from the most recent.


Yep. That's why a wiki is nice. If you open it up to everyone to
contribute, you'll get bad stuff but you'll get good stuff you just
wouldn't get otherwise. It's a great format to capture that.

Being an app maintainer is too much like bureaucracy. It makes
drive-by reports way too hard. Keep it simple, you'll get more
information and therefore more good information.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Wikipedia admin and press volunteer, so I think of
wikis as good default solutions for lots of things ;-)

What do users want from the AppDB? They want to know how well the app
works with Wine, and what tweaks are needed to get it working.

I'd be tempted to just go and start a wiki on the subject myself, but
it'd be duplicated effort with the present AppDB. So I'd rather try to
make a case for it.

The present AppDB is lacking in many ways that I think a wiki would help with.

I'm cc'ing this to wine-users - since I'd need to make a case for the
wiki to developers, but it's actually *for* the users. Users: what's
right and wrong with the AppDB? How useful is it for you? What would
make it better?


- d.



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