Hi Ben,

>I think wiki's would be more work for the www team to manage.  Wikis
>require even more discipline than the model we currently use.  I have
>seen too many free software wikis that are difficult to navigate, and
>that have redundant or contradictory information.  And I am not even
>mentioning the technical side of administering the software itself.
>  
>
I agree that having a wiki system might pose a technical challenge, but
I proposed it with a primary reason to make the various ports more
community centric, and easier to "get into". I also think that in the
long run, it might actually save you work because people will be able to
meta-mod (ie. I come by to check something out, I as a knowledgable
visitor see something that is/might be incorrect, I post an update or
addendum stating the case).

That said, indeed, it might impose more moderating work.

>The playstation2 page is minimal and only has information about old
>releases.  This would lead me to believe that the port is not active,
>and that a recent NetBSD will not be easy to get.  So I would read
>the mailing lists to learn more about it before trying it.
>  
>

The playstation page is just an example. the macppc page has quite a few
informative pages, but it really is a pain to traverse. I recently had
the joy of getting a Beige G3 booting, and imho there's a lot of
conflicting info regarding how to go about it. Since there are LOTS of
people with old macs, There's a huge interrest there for people to get
involved, however, I don't see any recent experiences of people trying
NetBSD 2 and 3 on borky firmware macs (of 1.x). Which I might find out
about when ploughing through the various maillinglist archives, but:

>Posting your experience is as simple as composing an email to
>port-foo@netbsd.org.  The searchable www archives let the world see it
>for all time.
>  
>
That's right, people could join up the mailinglists, choosing various
ones matching their specific interrests in NetBSD (I'm on ports-macppc,
ports-playstation2, netbsd-advocacy), but I think that most people will
only do so AFTER they got interrested and at least started with a
blinking NetBSD login prompt before them.

Imagine yourself a fledgeling NetBSD user-to-be, visiting netbsd.org for
the first time and lets assume you have moderate knowledge of UNIX
systems. Suppose you'd like to get NetBSD or anything resembling a good
UNIX working on your old style mac. In my opinion, the current port
specific pages turn you off. It is not imidiately clear where to get the
software, it is not clear which version is known to work (Going by the
title page, you'd think 3.0, but that's not often the case on other hw
platforms) and all in all it looks unmaintained and rather desolate;
you'd think that maybe nobody is using this nowadays (My feelings after
trying to boot 2.1, then 2.0.2, then 2.0.1 and finally 1.6.2 on a Beige
G3! Offtopic: In 2.x the SCSI driver fails to continue during the 2
second reset, works in 1.6.).

My ideas around this comes from my experiences with thinkwiki.org. I
really like the way they have this enormous amount of contributed
information about countless thinkpads, and still manage to keep it very
up to date! It feels alive and current, even though sometimes a link or
piece of info is not entirely correct.

Greets,

rubin ;-)