FreeNAS documentation wiki

[jkh]

Mod note: The FreeNAS documentation wiki has been shut down.

For information on FreeNAS Corral (which is unsupported and experimental), check the Development/FreeNAS Corral subforum.

For information on other versions of FreeNAS, please consult the manual for your version and the forums' Resources section.

For information on migrating away from Corral, please consult the following Resource, from the Resources Section:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ng-from-freenas-corral-to-freenas-9-10-11.36/

Show : Original post

But now re-branded and re-purposed as a place to put guides, FAQs and other documentation which doesn't fall naturally into the "online guide" that is bundled with FreeNAS (what you see when you click on the "Guide" icon in the FreeNAS UI). We also hope that, over time, it will evolve into a place to document best practices, HW dos-and-donts, and so on.

We also have full-time paid resources working on this wiki now so it won't just become an unstructured dumping ground - we're also looking to curate the information and keep everything looking nice!

Please let us know what you think of http://wiki.freenas.org and let us know if you would like to join the small team of people helping to curate and contribute to it.

Due to the unfortunate nature of spam bots and other miscreants who have already "attacked it" with bogus information less than 24 hours after it first went online, we'll need to approve each new account request manually, but please don't let that discourage you - we absolutely want community involvement, we just have to put up some barriers to prevent it from becoming a source of advertising for viagra and other "enlargement opportunities". ;)

Thanks!

The FreeNAS Development Team

 

[Ericloewe]

We also have full-time paid resources working on this wiki now so it won't just become an unstructured dumping ground

As in "people"? I'll assume that's some funky autocorrect and not HR-speak. :p

In any case, I'd like to ask what the official view regarding community guides and stuff is, more specifically, "Where should they go?" (I'd say it's also an open question to the community).

I'd sum up my thoughts as follows:

• Current situation with a mixture of stickies, links and stuff is unsustainable.
  
• There are two solutions:
  • The newly-functional Resources section
  • The wiki
• The resources section keeps the author in control of the document, which is an approach that has worked fairly well...
• ...but also keeps some information slightly out of date.
• The wiki makes keeping things up to date a bit easier
  • Also lowers the barrier of entry for content production, since people don't need to commit to taking care of whatever materials they're producing.
• The wiki would probably need Wikipedia-levels of bureaucracy (scaled down, obviously) to work.
• The Resources section is, I'd say, the natural evolution of the current method - everything works as it did before, but with more flexibility and everything is neatly grouped in one place.
• The wiki has potential to be a more interesting solution, but clear processes for things like moderator rights need to be established and they need to be clear and transparent (no pun intended).
• In either case, a middle group between "regular users" and "moderators" needs to exist, to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio. The wiki probably solves this by definition, whereas the Resources section requires tinkering with the forum permissions (if at all possible) - say, automatically give people with 100 posts (semi-arbitrary number I came up with) the right to write stuff in the Resources section

 

[Ericloewe]

Also, do I understand correctly that we should contact you (or some other specific person) to be signed up? Your wording makes it sound like we can sign up on the wiki itself, but will go through a vetting process to be approved - but that doesn't seem to be an option on the wiki.

 

[jkh]

As in "people"? I'll assume that's some funky autocorrect and not a HR-speak.

No, we also employ a few of the more advanced deep machine learning systems. They're paid in bitcoin. Please don't be so biocentric! Just being composed of carbon atoms doesn't make you intrinsically better and I, for one, welcome our new neural networking overlords.

In any case, I'd like to ask what the official view regarding community guides and stuff is, more specifically, "Where should they go?" (I'd say it's also an open question to the community).

I think that is an open question for the community indeed. Our primary goal in resurrecting the wiki is to give people a more structured tool with which to collaborate. Posting PDFs or Powerpoint presentations to the Forum have obviously lacked a certain something when it comes to version control, collaborative writing, and review. The point of using MediaWiki is to give us the same fundamentally powerful tool that Wikipedia uses for organizing what is obviously a huge amount of content. By contrast, our problem space is much simpler, and if we can "translate" even the small handful of guides and documents that have been published on the forum to date, we'll be off to a good start. From there, the community augmented with more predictably full-time resources can take it anywhere it wants/needs to go.

Perhaps we should start with just a small number of initial targets for transcription (Uncle Fester's guide, perhaps?) and seek to improve the FAQ. Those are both challenges with relatively clear success criteria, at least if the goals are reasonably modest.

 

[jkh]

Also, do I understand correctly that we should contact you (or some other specific person) to be signed up? Your wording makes it sound like we can sign up on the wiki itself, but will go through a vetting process to be approved - but that doesn't seem to be an option on the wiki.

Please contact me in the forum or in email for now - we are still trying to figure out how to deal with the spam problem, and MediaWiki doesn't really offer the same approved signup mechanism that this Forum software does (and it has the same problem).

 

[Ericloewe]

f we can "translate" even the small handful of guides and documents that have been published on the forum to date, we'll be off to a good start. From there, the community augmented with more predictably full-time resources can take it anywhere it wants/needs to go.

There are two options: Quick and dirty and fix it up for the wiki format later OR Clean them up now (including revisions, if needed/wanted).

I started the former with the Resources section (which is far closer in format to the forum than a wiki) with some of my stuff, but I'd probably advocate the latter approach for the wiki.

Perhaps we should start with just a small number of initial targets for transcription (Uncle Fester's guide, perhaps?)

Sounds like a good first project, to iron out how things are supposed to work.
Synchronization is going to be needed, though. A discussion page on the wiki would probably be required to keep track of that stuff, besides the articles' talk pages. I look forward to the mutex/semaphore/reader-writer lock jokes involving locks on the wiki.

seek to improve the FAQ

Perhaps that's a task better suited for a slightly later date. It's a bit open-ended and requires some planning, otherwise it'll be a disorganized dumping ground.

 

[Magnus33]

Fantastic!

I made a poll about the guides sometime back because i felt things where getting to jumbled.

There lots of great info out there but much of it was scattered and contradicting itself which was becoming seriously confusing for newbies and others alike.

When i simple questions like how much memory is needed becomes a lot of recommending rather then what you can actually due without danger it needed cleaning up.

 

[danb35]

So what's happened to the wiki? The link redirects to the forums.

 

[anodos]

So what's happened to the wiki? The link redirects to the forums.

It was closed. I believe that @dlavigne migrated what was worth keeping to the Forums.

 

[danb35]

Again? I thought most of the extant Corral documentation was there, as well as the "official" copy of Uncle Fester's guide. Good thing I didn't take that down, I guess...