[Haskell-community] Haskell Wiki and Infra

[Gershom B]

(changing the subject line to reflect this thread)

On September 1, 2016 at 7:48:46 PM, Patrick Pelletier
(code at funwithsoftware.org) wrote:
>
> In that vein, is there a place to file bugs against HaskellWiki? Or is
> that one of the areas in need of a volunteer? My own personal itch I'd
> like to scratch is the lack of diffs on the wiki:
>
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2016-April/123701.html
>
> Many thanks to the Haskell Committee, to FP Complete, and to all of the
> volunteers who work on Haskell!

For issues with the haskell wiki as well as all other infrastructure
problems in general, the admin at haskell.org mail alias hits a group of
infra maintainers. A github tracker that’s more widely advertised as
well might not be a bad idea, since its become so standard.

Over the years our current infra/ops team has gotten rather busy in
other arenas, so we could use volunteers nearly everywhere (anyone
with any sysadmin experience, even if just on a personal box, and who
feels they’ll have ongoing time to donate, please email me! and again,
anyone who can help deal with mail stuff would be especially
appreciated at this moment). We keep things humming, but haven’t
really freed up the time to tackle much in the way of pushing things
forward.

But you’re correct that the wiki could absolutely use a volunteer. I
made a bit of an effort last year to get things rolling, but it
stalled out pretty quickly
(https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2015-April/119219.html).
Perhaps the call was too ambitious and people didn’t know where to
start. Maybe it just needed more energy and will to drive it than any
of us had in supply at the moment. We _did_ get a team of people
approving new accounts instead of just one overworked individual.
(Thank you to all who have done that and continue to! It irks me that
we need such a manual process, but the waves of spam we got before
periodically despite our capcha efforts were far worse).

I can’t quite infer from your message if you are volunteering
yourself. If you are, thank you so much for your offer! Please email
me and we’ll coordinate how to get you the right login credentials,
etc.

Best,
Gershom

(Note, by the way, those who may be hesitant to volunteer not out of
lack of time or desire to help, but out of fear you don’t have enough
experience or knowledge — most admin work [to be honest like most
programming] isn’t knowing what to do right away, but instead about
knowing some desired end goal, and then being willing to wade through
a bunch of searching and documentation to come up with a plan, talking
it over with folks, perhaps experimenting a bit, and eventually
finally knowing what to do. And, of course, knowing which experiments
are irreversable and shouldn’t be conducted :-). And the hardest step
usually isn’t in fixing any problem,  but in making the mental leap
from “this is a problem someone should fix” to “this is a problem I
will fix”.)