Remove the link to the old Python wiki?

I think this discussion needs a reboot.

First of all, it would have been appropriate to reach out to the folks who have maintained the wiki for almost two decades. These details are available on the wiki frontpage.

Essentially, you should have asked on the pydotorg-www@python.org mailing list for opinions of whether the wiki is still relevant or not.

My opinion on this, as one of the maintainers, is very clear: the wiki is an important community resource and one of the few places where anyone can help to add and modify content, without any heavy processes – very much unlike the python.org website, which uses a CMS for content, to which only a few people have access.

It’s definitely a place that needs to stay for the benefit of the community.

With respect to other comments in the thread:

  • The wiki styling looks very different from the www.python.org styling, so it’s obvious that people are looking at a different website when going from www.python.org to wiki.python.org.

  • The link on www.python.org to the wiki is buried deep in the community menu. It’s not prominent and I don’t understand how this can be “the first stop when they look for the docs” for many people. There’s a clear “Docs” link at the top of python.org and a “Documentation” menu item, so those will most likely be the first stop.

  • About the wiki providing older information: this is the nature of a resource which is maintained by the community. Pages which are not actively maintained or deal with topics which aren’t hot at the moment, don’t receive a lot of edits.

    IMO, the right way to address this, is not to alienate the wiki from python.org, but instead to provide help with updating the content and/or create more awareness for the wiki on python.org in order to have more editors help with updating or adding new pages.

  • I also don’t think that adding a banner of some sort would help. This would only cause people to interpret it as a warning. Instead, we could have a discussion on how to modify the templates to make the fact that people are looking at the Python wiki more obvious. It is true that this information is currently mostly available in the title of the wiki pages and could be made more prominent.

  • Regarding making the wiki more mobile friendly, there is a separate discussion here:

    Wiki.python.org is not mobile-friendly - #24 by malemburg

    and I have put the theme up on github for people to submit PRs against:

    GitHub - malemburg/moin-europython-theme: EuroPython Theme for moin

I believe that most maintainers of the wiki would be happy to work together with the Python Documentation Editorial Board, but you should not forget that people have been putting in a great deal of effort to keep the wiki up and running over the years (it has been running since 2005).

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