Tim Rowledge wrote:

> Since there is no practical way to have an overseer for these things we have
> to at least occasionally take a look and see what sort of a tangle of weeds
> has grown up. It's a typical problem with common property; everyone thinks
> it's everyone else's problem to care for it. Stuff that is dead - such as
> non-existent links -can be removed completely. Horribly out of date stuff can
> be de-linked from the main pages and put into a storage ward for possible
> use in organ transplants.

This was the issue that Andreas and I disagreed most of all - he wanted
to simply delete the swiki completely while I wanted something more like
what you are suggesting. I understood his viewpoint: he had Teleplace
clients doing searches like "squeak truetype fonts" and finding obsolete
advice that could have very nasty results if followed. His proposal,
would result in such searches turning up lots of new broken links, which
he felt was the lesser of two evils.

I don't like to have any information simply disappear from the web.
Specially since I do sometimes use old versions of stuff and need that
obsolete information. But I agree that people shouldn't stumble into it
without knowing that it is not current. This, by the way, is not just a
Squeak problem. Just try to seach for solutions to sound configuration
or packet forwarding issues in Linux, for example.

My proposal was to freeze the old swiki into static pages, adding a
large warning at the top of each one about how the page is now outdated.
We could have a new swiki started from scratch and linked to from the
front page and the rest of squeak.org. If the new swiki got a page with
the same information as one of the old ones, the warning in the latter
should include a link to the new version.

About a year ago I was forced to do something similar to my own swiki
since I had to move my site to a new server which doesn't run Squeak and
didn't allow me to use port 8080 (so I was unable to keep the old links
working). I did a very quick and dirty job, but it did show that my
original proposal was reasonable.

My fear about deleting the old swiki and starting a new one was that the
effort would peter out one third of the way (for example) and we would
simply be left with far less information available about Squeak than we
have now. Given that a common complaint about both Squeak and Smalltalk
in general is the perception that there is a lack of documentation
compared to other languages, I don't think this would be a good idea.

-- Jecel