[gdal-dev] Trac Wiki

[Howard Butler]

> On Mar 27, 2019, at 5:56 AM, Jeff McKenna <jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-03-26 8:58 AM, Even Rouault wrote:
>> The possible scenarios I see:
>> 1) status quo with Trac wiki
>> 2) migrate all or almost all content from Trac wiki to GitHub wiki, and kill
>> Trac wiki
>> 3) migrate part of Trac wiki to the future official RST doc, abandon&kill
>> remaining non relevant info, and have no wiki at all. In the final state, the
>> whole doc is the RST doc (PROJ current situation)
>> 4) migrate part of Trac wiki to the future official RST doc, migrate remaining
>> doc to gitub wiki, and kill Trac wiki.
>> 3) or 4) would seem the most preferable outcome to me.
> 
> My feedback on the #3 option:   wikis allow anyone to share their steps, tips, and prevent the 'funnel' happening where 1 or 2 people must approve doc changes, to the more official public site.
> 
> I prefer #4, but leave the old wiki pages in place & set them to read-only.

I prefer #3, which is also the same situation that PROJ and MapServer have. The problem with wikis is rot and they compete for attention and search engine juice with official documentation channels. The challenge with GDAL site over the years has been the process to update has been quite onerous. A Sphinx-based site with github workflow is going to help alleviate that challenge quite a bit. It certainly did for the PROJ project, and it attracted a number of contributors who otherwise were not participating. 

My proposal is at https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/1204#issue-398700112 <https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/1204#issue-398700112> and I plan to have automated infrastructure similar to PROJ in place by the Minneapolis Sprint https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Sprint_2019 <https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Community_Sprint_2019> for participants to be able to help work the task of porting over and organizing the bulk of the materials. Once that job is done, we can do some refinement in preparation for the GDAL 2.5 release. A big part of the effort will be preserving old links with redirects, but those would be main site items, not wiki articles.

Howard
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