[Wine] Garbage Reference Sites.

oiaohm wineforum-user at winehq.org
Sun Feb 14 17:29:39 CST 2010


Danila Sentiabov  I am just as stuck as you.   There is no way for Forum and Mailing list to PM each other.

So that leaves me 1 option start a thread about it.   I don't mind if other people chip in.

All the things I call garbage reference sites have 1 thing in common.   Failure to give credit to source of the information their instructions are based off.    Lot are rewritten as if they are the source of the information.  Result is people are no longer able to find the source.

I would 100 percent prefer people don't refer people to Garbage Reference Sites.   This referring is keeping them in existence.

Some Ubuntu authors don't produce what I class as Garbage.    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine  Ok has recommendations  against what wine developers recommend.   But they do at least provide the correct links.  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareEquivalents  Same here.  Early on Ubuntu guys started making there own copy paste lists of Equivalents as well but common sense kicked in.

Links to source of the information are important.

The defense is always that the instructions by the maintainers is too hard to read.   Even if the maintainers information is in a open wiki that could be added to.

Garbage reference produces have a few other things in common.   They are loners.   They will not attempt to provide the source of their information with more user-friendly versions. 

So we end up in a disgusting cycle of ugly.  
1) Maintainer who knows what information should be in the instructions not seeing the instructions users are using.
2) Users not able to find way to Maintainer when things don't work.
3) Maintainers documentation staying lower quality that it should be.
4) Garbage reference produces thinking they are more and more important because information is hard to find so make more Garbage reference Material.  Even that there actions are just making everything worse.  So finding the maintainer becomes harder and harder.

We have to decide what we want.   Do we want useful documentation that works or not.   Supporting people producing garbage reference material is basically a vote for non usable reference material.







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