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irfan | 11 years ago

Great effort but isn't wikipedia a better place to make such documents?

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Stratoscope|11 years ago

No, Wikipedia would never allow such a document. It would be knocked down as "original research".

But I have to agree with you, I don't think GitHub is a great way to collaborate on this kind of document either. Case in point: I noticed a few minor typos and errors in the document, so like a good GitHub citizen I went through the whole process. Forked the repo. Made my changes. Submitted a pull request.

And then GitHub couldn't merge the changes!

So the author asked me if I could pull the latest version from his repo and see if the changes could be merged that way. I (hopefully politely!) declined, saying it would be easier for him to just type in these minor changes from my diff instead of having both of us worry about how to do the merge. And the author was a real gentleman and took care of it.

If this were some software code, I would do it differently, of course - I would have cloned the repo locally after forking it and edited there so I could do a proper merge. But I didn't want to mess with all that, I just wanted to fix a couple of typos! So I edited my fork online and did the pull request from there.

So yeah, GitHub isn't ideal for this. And if Wikipedia doesn't encourage this kind of document, there are plenty of other wikis that do.