[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

This is an old revision of the document!


News from the site admins

This page will be expanded soon, hopefully during the weekend.

The choice of software

This Wiki runs the DokuWiki software. Basically when setting up a serious wiki there are two choices: MediaWiki and DokuWiki. I have extensive experience with both - running DokuWiki for my own Slackware knowledgebase, and running a MediaWiki based knowledgebase for the customer Helpdesk I am the teamleader of.

The choice for DokuWiki was made for several reasons: its syntax makes it more suitable for writing documentation as opposed to MediaWiki which is more general-purpose. Also, DokuWiki is self-contained in a single directory and does not require a SQL database, which makes it highly portable (I intend to make a “daily snapshot” tarball available for download once the Wiki fundament is complete). The DokuWiki also allows the use of Access Control Lists which we are going to implement after we have formed a team of editors (those who are going to be responsible for having high-quality texts while you, the authors, are responsible for the technical content).

The Wiki's functionality has been extended with several syntax plugins, which you will find listed at the bottom of the Wiki syntax page. You can follow the links for those plugins if you want to learn what they allow you to do when writing an article.

Artwork

The artwork used at the moment was created by asteroid who has some more examples of nice graphics on his own user page.
I asked (and received permission) from Patrick Volkerding to use these modifications of original Slackware artwork here on the Wiki.

Sidebar

To the left of the page you will find a sidebar with several boxes which can be edited (by the admins). Only the “toolbox” box is part of the monobook template we are using for the site, and can not be modified (or rather, I do not want to modify it because that makes future upgrades a pain).
If you have suggestions about entries which should absolutely be in one of thoose boxes, let us know (use the discussion page).

Project Charter

FIXME

This is going to be the paragraph where we will explain the goals of and vision behind this documentation project, and the “rules” we want to define for its content. Call it a “social contract” if you decide you want to contribute to the project.

Community driven

Even though this documentation site has a hostname in the slackware.com domain, that does not mean it is a Slackware-controlled or sponsored project. The use of the domain name is a token of approval, rather. Also, the project was bootstrapped by Alien BOB, a Slackware coreteam member.
The content of the Wiki will not be controlled by “higher powers”. The content on any page in this wiki is determined by its author(s) and contributor(s).

Wiki structure

The core structure of the Wiki will be maintained by the site admins. That means: namespaces, visual identity, access controls and the like. Ideas for changing the core structure of the Wiki can be submitted through our mailing list ( http://lists.alienbase.nl/mailman/listinfo/slackdocs) or by editing the discussion page. The actual content is all up to you! We will not refuse any article.

Assuring quality

[Not implemented yet] Our goal is to give you total creative freedom when writing content for the Wiki. But for the sake of quality assurance, we ask you to co-operate with one of our editors.
He or she may be able to offer suggestions about tags to use in your article so that it gets properly listed in the TOC. We also have tag categories that allow you to indicate your article applies to certain versions of Slackware only. You get the idea? You can also discuss an appropriate namespace to put your article in (consider a namespace as a wiki equivalent of a subdirectory - actually that is how it is implemented in the server's filesystem). The editor's primary role is to advise you on the structure of your article, ensure that it looks good, uses well-formed sentences - essentially that what any book editor would also do for you. You (the author of the article) will remain in control over the technical content! The editor will not enter into discussions about the (technical) content of yur article, unless he spotted blatant errors of course. We assume that since you wrote it, you know better what you are talking about than do we…

In order to assist the editor with his work, the Wiki implements a mechanism of “publishing a page”. This means that the creation of a new page, or editing an existing page, will automatically put that page in “Draft” mode. The “Draft” message will be prominemtly visible on the page. If you are editing an existing page, then the original (approved) page will remain be visible to visitors of our Wiki. Only the registered users of the wiki (i.e. your fellow authors) will be able to see the draft instead of the approved version.
You have to consult one of our editors to get your page revision approved. That action will make it visible to the world.

Respect other people's work

Whenever other people's content is copied into this Wiki, any license and copyright terms which are applicable to the original content will be respected.
The name of the original author(s) as well as the originating URL have to be mentioned in the footer of your (possibly modified) copy of that content.

The content of this wiki is published under a liberal “Creative Commons” license: CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported . Take this into consideration if you intended to publish copyrighted information here.

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