Some notes on the Wiki (was: 4.1 news item)

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Giovanni Bajo wrote:

> My personal position is that making documentation patches *blocked* by
> review (as happens with code) is wrong. The worst thing it can happen is
> that the documentation patch is wrong, and the doc maintainer can revert it
> in literally seconds (using the Wiki; in minutes/hours using the TeX).

It's not for the doc maintainer to know whether most doc patches are 
correct or not; it should be the maintainer of the relevant parts of the 
compiler who reviews them in general.

> Nobody is going to be blocked by this; no bootstrap will be broken; no wrong
> code will be generated. This ain't code. In many common cases, the

Wrong code will be generated when someone relies on subtly wrong 
information in the documentation.  It is a well-established failure mode 
even on the best wikis (i.e. Wikipedia) that someone inserts subtly wrong 
information because of not knowing better (or not knowing that there is 
controversy among experts about which of two versions is correct) and this 
does not get corrected soon if at all.  There may be *policies* of 
providing references to back up claims made, but (a) that can't work in 
the context of GCC and (b) I don't see Wikipedia edits routinely getting 
reverted simply for lack of substantiating evidence.  We're dealing with 
subtle matters where there may be no one expert on the subject, and where 
reversion may not in general be any better than applying the patch: where 
the proper response will involve discussion of the individual edit to 
clarify the basis for the claims made and whether things should be 
refined.

Perhaps the wiki could automatically send all changes to gcc-patches to 
assist in review?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)