How, precisely, can we improve?

Simon Peyton Jones simonpj at microsoft.com
Tue Sep 27 14:22:24 UTC 2016 

We currently have *3* wikis:

        https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0>
        https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc
        https://phabricator.haskell.org/w/

I didn’t even know about  the third of these, but the first two have clearly differentiated goals:

·        https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0> is about user-facing, and often user-generated, documentation.  Guidance about improving performance, programming idioms, tutorials etc.

·        https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc is about GHC’s implementation, oriented to people who want to understand how GHC works, and how to modify it.

I think this separation is actually quite helpful.

I agree with what you and others say about the difficulty of keeping wikis organised. But that’s not primarily a technology issue: there is a genuinely difficult challenge here.  How do you build and maintain up-to-date, navigable, well-organised information about a large, complex, and rapidly changing artefact like GHC?  A wiki is one approach that has the merit that anyone can improve it; control is not centralised.  But I’d love there to be other, better solutions.

Simon

From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Sven Panne
Sent: 27 September 2016 08:46
To: ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: How, precisely, can we improve?

Just a remark from my side: The documentation/tooling landscape is a bit more fragmented than it needs to be IMHO. More concretely:

   * We currently have *3* wikis:

        https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0>
        https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc
        https://phabricator.haskell.org/w/


     It's clear to me that they have different emphases and different origins, but in the end this results in valuable information being scattered around. Wikis in general are already quite hard to navigate (due to their inherent chaotic "structure"), so having 3 of them makes things even worse. It would be great to have *the* single Haskell Wiki directly on haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0> in an easily reachable place.

   * To be an active Haskell community member, you need quite a few different logins: Some for the Wikis mentioned above, one for Hackage, another one for Phabricator, perhaps an SSH key here and there... Phabricator is a notable exception: It accepts your GitHub/Google+/... logins. It would be great if the other parts of the Haskell ecosystem accepted those kinds of logins, too.

   * https://haskell-lang.org/<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org%2F&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=9ndNQVeDQy7lPb4qmn13k%2BAtztK8F9Hq%2B2jeXKm9YFU%3D&reserved=0> has great stuff on it, but its relationship to haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0> is unclear to me. Their "documentation" sub-pages look extremely similar, but haskell-lang.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=G9e%2BVDuPTtZHZl%2BGd2fFShUznQjDa158JENjoMiD0VY%3D&reserved=0> has various (great!) tutorials and a nice overview of common libraries on it. From an external POV it seems to me that haskell-lang.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=G9e%2BVDuPTtZHZl%2BGd2fFShUznQjDa158JENjoMiD0VY%3D&reserved=0> should be seamlessly integrated into haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0>, i.e. merged into it. Having an endless sea of links on haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0> is not the same as having content nicely integrated into it, sorted by topic, etc.

All those points are not show-stoppers for people trying to be more active in the Haskell community, but nevertheless they make things harder than they need to be, so I fear we lose people quite early. To draw an analogy: As probably everybody who actively monitors their web shop/customer site knows, even seemlingy small things moves customers totally away from your site. One unclear payment form? The vast majority of your potential customers aborts the purchase immediately and forever. One confusing interstitial web page? Say goodbye to lots of people. One hard-to-find button/link? A forced login/new account? => Commercial disaster, etc. etc.

Furthermore, I'm quite aware of the technical/social difficulties of my proposals, but that shouldn't let us stop trying to improve...

Cheers,
   S.
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