The community page is a great way to discuss new ideas and topics, but once the laptop has launched, it would be great to have a user-editable wiki that can be used as quick reference. For example, you could have pages on framework specific hardware (expansion cards etc), general PC hardware (explanation of what each component in the laptop does eg ram) as well as non-framework specific stuff like installing alternative OSes. Also, by making it user-editable people making expansion cards for the marketplace could make a wiki page for their card, meaning users don’t have to find the right website a few months after buying the card to check how to use a certain aspect of it…
Basically, what I am envisioning is something like the Arch Linux wiki, but more geared towards laptop hardware…
We are exploring using Discourse’s (this forum software) built in wiki functionality, though I don’t believe it is currently turned on. I agree it is super useful to have wiki capabilities for community edited lists and guides.
Can a wiki tag be created? I haven’t found a way to find a wiki without searching the name of a thread that I know became a wiki, and having a tag for them would make them easier to find.
Shall we enable the wiki feature for this thread or create the new “Linux on the Framework Laptop” topic with pin and wiki features under the Linux category? I think it’s useful as a top level document for Linux on Framework Laptop.
Also shall we create a new topic for FAQ or a new topic as a top level info of Shipping, Order, Availability on countries with pin and wiki features under Getting Started category? As you know we see lots of similar topics and questions about it. I listed similar threads for usefulness.
I came across this page today. There is a guides site where you can signup to create guides that can be then approved by the admins.
I think the guide page is for kind of tidy documents officially supported by Framework. The wiki I am suggesting here is more about relaxed documents for community by community. The wiki can adapt for quickly updated topics.
I think 2 layers structure for the documents is useful, and seen on a business model with a community.
Things supported by a vendor, company. Characteristic: Slow and less frequently updated. Small size. Verification. Support. Tidy.
Things organized by a community. Characteristic: Quick and more frequently updated. Diverse. Big size. Non-support. Relax. Experimental.
After playing with the Wiki feature in Discourse (I’m the owner of the thunderbolt thread), I can say I’ve found it to be rather lacking. The narrow layout of the website does not play well with wide tables like I’d like to have in that thread (such as a column for every testing point so we make sure not to forget any) and the lack of formatting options (e.g. for code) is rather unfortunate.
The Framework Guides are a great addition for things like assembly/disassembly instructions, however for community-curated content, I see a couple of options.
A MediaWiki site. There is already a large audience of people who understand the engine from being Wikipedia editors or from maintaining other sites run using the software. The downsides to this solution is the need for dedicated hosting and either support from Frame.work or trusted members of the community to administrate and moderate full time.
A generated static site. This can be hosted for free on GitHub (with free SSL or some existing SSL certificate) and can be run fairly self-sufficiently by the community without support from Frame.work employees, which could make it more attractive. There is a bit more up-front setup and we would need a GitHub repo for it (possibly under the existing Frame.work organization) and they would need to make a team for community contributors, though this is not much work on their end. It also includes change tracking systems and the ability to approve or deny changes, which guarantees protection from vandalism edits. Content is typically written in Markdown, which is already being used in Discourse, so we have that going for us.
I have moved from MediaWiki to static sites for all of my community-contributed content and have seen decent adoption. While the GitHub flow is new for some, the tools built into the website for one-off changes are pretty strong, and for large contributors, learning to use Git is not difficult especially with the multitude of GUI-based tools. A contribution guide can be included to walk new users through making edits.
Personally I use statiq for its C# Razor support which provides a lot of flexibility in building the site, though Jekyll and Hugo are also popular options.
If we have an interest, I can set up a sample repo using Framework’s site theme as a base and submit it for review.
@jeshikat Yes. It’s a “feature” of the Discourse forum software that framework is using to run this site. The developers of Discourse seem to be highly concerned about posts being vandalized by their original author, so unless a post is converted to a wiki (which allows anyone to edit the post), edits are locked after a certain time. This cannot be disabled, but it can be extended. I believe the default is 24 hours.
Regarding the ease of use and presentation of Discourse as a wiki, there is a meta thread about a blog post where someone scrapes Discourse to generate a static site wiki.
Personally, it seems the wiki post type on Discourse combined with the active community discussion and guides should work quite well.
