Hi Paul,
I strongly support the idea of wikis interlinked with RFCs. I'd like to offer
two very successful examples, both much more relevant than Wikipedia: the PHP
Manual (see for examplehttp://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date-parse.php),
and the jQuery manual (e.g.http://api.jquery.com/bind/). In both cases these
are managed as extended comments to the main text. I believe RFCs will need a
more sophisticated solution, since they are obviously much larger than a manual
page.
Thanks,
Yaron
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:06:21 -0700
From: Paul Hoffman<paul(_dot_)hoffman(_at_)vpnc(_dot_)org>
To: IETF Discussion<ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Subject: Wikis for RFCs
Message-ID:<E6915760-D4AE-4DEF-A660-4FACDB7E22D4(_at_)vpnc(_dot_)org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
On Sep 16, 2011, at 9:39 AM, Keith Moore wrote:
On Sep 16, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
Again I would like to bring up the idea of every RFC having an associated wiki
page(s). The goal here is to provide a way for implementors to add comments,
annotations, clarifications, corrections etc to augment the RFCs. Whilst such
commentary can often be found on IETF mailing lists after an RFC is published
locating those and searching them can be tedious - plus the full history of
discussion on various points is often not relevant to an implementor - all they
need to know is what is the correct way to do it now.
Doing something like this would obviously require some investment in additional
infrastructure. There are also questions about how we would maintain the
integrity of the information on the wiki pages, but I think those are things we
can easily address.
This is something that could be implemented on a volunteer basis as an
experiment. If it worked, perhaps IETF could be convinced to take it over.
Volunteer moderating of such a Wiki could easily lead to the wiki being of
little or no value, and being an embarrassment to the IETF. Consider an RFC
that might be construed as supporting the use of NATs on the Internet. Open
commenting on the RFC could be fodder for certain people commenting about the
applicability of the RFC because NATs Are Evil. There would then likely be
counter-comments from people who feel that NATs Have Value. Such comments, if
moderated, could be very valuable to an implementer who knows about the RFC but
not the bigger picture; unmoderated comments would be no more useful than some
of the permathreads on the WG list that created the RFC.
Wikipedia is about the only example of working volunteer moderation, and even
then, there are cabals that supported by the paid management. Few, if any, of
the unmanaged wiki sites have long-lasting value.
--Paul Hoffman
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