Wiki for Haiku

Welcome! We now have a Wiki for for BeOS & Haiku and would love to get more contributors! To get to it go to https://wiki.beos.retro-os.live/ - if you have any questions just PM me…

Been working on it for a couple weeks but it is now getting ready for use so I thought I would post here…

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Great initiative, @MarisaG!

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see an equivalent to the BeOS Bible: printed books are sooo twentieth century. This could be the equivalent for us if we all pitch in.

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Just to avoid confusion, Haiku itself already has a wiki TitleIndex – Haiku ; But that is about Haiku the OS itself.

Anyhow, I am a bit concerned about all these third party things beeing branded Haiku, especially the mail server. It’s certainly not official or endorsed, but makes the impression as if it would be… :confused:

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I don’t think that just using the word "Haiku " is enough to cause confusion any more than using the word “mac” means that it is from Apple. Same thing for “win” implies Microsoft…

You can hardly call it “the operating system that may not be named because it belongs to some corporation that has completely forgotten about it & the open-source operating system that can also not be named because it doesn’t have an official endorsement wiki” :smiley:

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LOL! Well put!

Once again thank you very much for offering so many great community services :+1:
A Wiki is a nice addition to what we already have.
I think I may write something about native Haiku programming stuff when I find some time,or write guides for the topics I have to answer on the forum over and over again.

That being said,it’s really a shame that your other site has so few activity :confused:
The community timeline is 90% just me writing about my BeAIM progress.

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“Mac” is hardware. THe appropriate analogy would be “Apple”. I don’t know if there’d be any trouble with an “applemail” site, or a MacOS wiki run by some random user, but I can imagine there’d be some concern, maybe legitimate concern. Does that require explanation?

btw, the appropriate analogy would be “MacOS” which is the name of the operating system as opposed to Haiku.
I appreciate this initiative, thank you @MarisaG for that. I’m more concerned about the competition with BeSly, to be honest. Not because it is not legitimate but there’s a risk to dilute the knowledge which is now spread across two different sources.

While I appreciate everything the guys at Besly have done over many years, their knowledge base is getting dated in places.


Look under “Office”, Gobe Productive, but no Calligra, no LibreOffice. And we’ve had both of those for years now.

I get it. You run out of steam after a while. As Wikipedia has shown, a wiki can be kept up to date. When one set of people drop out, another set can take over.

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I agree with @michel here, the BeSly site is really awesome (especially the old one with Haiku-like webdesign, but that may be personal taste) but it lacks some topics that would be interesting to users.
A Wiki offers the possibility to extend it to anyone who cares and wants to invest some time.
If a article already exists, but lacks some details or the things have changed since it has been written, someone else can easily extend or update the article.
BeSly accepts articles from the community, but you have to send it by email and the admins decide if they want to publish it or not.
That’s a higher barrier for entry compared to a Wiki that anyone can easily edit in the browser.

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But at the same time, if an article is approved to publication, you can expect it to meet some quality levels.

Not against Marisa´s idea, just also worried about diluting efforts

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Hello everyone,

it’s true that we accept articles via email and then publish them. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, we want to ensure that no illegal entries end up on our site, for which we have to take responsibility.
Another reason is that we had a number of fake users and bots on our site and the time required to administer them was higher than the time needed to enter and publish an article.
Furthermore, we usually test the submitted contributions to ensure that the content works, thus ensuring a certain level of quality.

The fact that we haven’t had any really great new articles lately is because lelldorin and I are both very busy with our families.

You are all welcome to join us. I can also set up users for you.

Regards lorglas

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That’s correct. To describe this software, i.e. to create a tutorial for it, you would have to use it. The installation runs via HaikuDepot and doesn’t need to be described, since you don’t need to include an external repo. There’s plenty of documentation for these office suites. Of course, if the respective Haiku version were completely or largely different from the one on other systems, then you could create a corresponding tutorial. Since Lible Office has never really worked for me (crashes and such) and there are/were constantly new versions, it’s difficult to be up to date on this.

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I can understand that people would prefer a wiki where anyone can edit something. That sounds much easier at first. Unfortunately, tutorials, especially from the Linux sector, have repeatedly shown that they are incomplete or assume too much to understand. That was one of the most important aspects of our knowledge base.

Over the years, I’ve repeatedly searched for old sources for tutorials about be OS and also Zeta, so that they don’t fall into oblivion. You can’t see it that way, but it’s the reason why the old.besly.de still exists, and why we split and created the haiku-only (besly.de) page. That’s also the reason why you can still find many entries for “be” and “ze” next to “ha” in the “tutorial finder” program. Preserving knowledge. I haven’t always been able to locate an author, and I haven’t always received permission to include something in the knowledge base. This is another important aspect, because just because something hasn’t been supported for a long time or is considered obsolete doesn’t mean you can simply post it online (for example, an issue of ZeMag or InsideBeOS).

There are good reasons why we only allow contributions via email. Not because we don’t value your work, but because we have to take responsibility for the content.

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Yes, unfortunately. And when you do find time, you spend it reading forum posts (moderating), fixing bugs in our software, or adding new hardware to the hardware database. So, we’re not as active there as we were years ago. I’ve often resolved to reserve one day a week for haiku, but unfortunately, I often lack the energy.

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And yes, I also need to make some new videos again. I have a long list. I’m also considering doing some of them in English (e.g., the description of my software), but my English isn’t that good. Thanks for your great work, @michel.

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You’re certainly not alone in that. I liked it better too, especially in terms of the administration. However, we had to redesign and change it because many people wanted to use the site on their mobile devices, and that wasn’t easy to implement in the old version.

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This is precisely what shouldn’t happen; any information can be knowingly or unknowingly misdescribed. The existing beos and haiku wikis take care to prevent this.

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@MarisaG: It looks like you need ImageMagick on your server

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