Site Discussion
Site Mission
What do you think the mission for this site should be?
To differentiate this wiki from Wikipedia, I'd say that it's intended for learning about computers, and answering questions, rather than writing encyclopedic entries. Practically, that means that it can take a didactic tone (asking the readers to consider questions, feature q&a sections, etc., etc.,.) rather than a purely informational tone, and that it welcomes questions. It also means that the wiki community can take a point of view on things. LionKimbro
- Subject matter: Computing systems.
- Audience, perspective: Computer system users that try to understand their system or modify the way it works. For example, someone who has a particular issue with her system and seeks the know-how to resolve the issue.
- Scope: Indefinite, according to user interest and varying from article to article (as with most if not all wikis).
- Organization: Multiple methods (categorizations) can be supported (as with all computer-based media).
- Features: Publicly editable, versioned, multi-user, etc. Many other, similar knowledge bases lack these MediaWiki features.
In the 'Wanted Pages' section, there are many links to pages that I would expect to be found on Wikipedia. Articles with at least some encyclopedic content should be in Wikipedia, rather than here. What is 'encyclopedic'? If an article describes a thing (usually a class of things), or a concept (for example, an interface, like Socket 939), it should go in Wikipedia. If an article gives only a solution to a particular problem, it should go here. For example, a description of an error message and how to get rid of it would not normally be appropriate for Wikipedia and should go here.
As a side note: If links to Wikipedia articles are more common than internal links, it might make sense to have ordinary links point to Wikipedia by default.
--Infologist 03:01, 22 Dec 2005 (UTC)
Hosting content in a wiki makes it vulnerable to malicious modification. This is especially dangerous for content such as a how-to or a FAQ. I do not see a perfect solution for this problem, just as there is no perfect solution for it with any public wiki.
Possible solution to this are
- vigilance of the wiki editors ("Wikilance" :-),
- a separation of the publicly editable "development" wiki from a moderated, somewhat delayed "production" copy of the wiki and
- vigilance and common sense of the wiki readers.
The readers' vigilance can be spurred by
- ubiquitous warnings, also known as disclaimers and helped by
- references to non-editable sites with related content (references).
Such a wiki with non-encyclopedic content may need dedicated labels for speculation, unanswered questions, potentially dangerous instructions and so on.
--Infologist 10:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Computing Knowledgebase's first birthday
- Happy 1st birthday, Computing Knowledgebase! (January 28) - Congratulations on your first year, Philralph 09:43, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
Project N.E.M.E.S.I.S
Project Nemesis will be equality to Computers anywhere that we'll be able to trust.