Wiki pages that apply to only one release

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Jun 6, 2006, at 10:29 PM, Corey Burger wrote:
> ...
> On 6/6/06, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> ...
>> Absolutely not. Provided that the pages are appropriately labelled,
>> there's no reason to remove information that's useful to people who
>> (for whatever reason) can't upgrade their OS. Support.microsoft.com
>> still includes knowledge base articles for Windows 3.1, and
>> info.apple.com still includes knowledge base articles for System 7.
>
> Warty is not supported anymore

Sure, but that is irrelevant to whether Web pages about it that let 
people help themselves should be allowed to remain.

> and users should not be using it.

If someone using Ubuntu 4.10 encounters a severe problem for which the 
solution was described on a wiki page, and later versions of Ubuntu 
don't work with their hardware for whatever reason, would it be better 
for them to switch back to Windows 98?

> If someone came to Apple or MS and asked them to support 7 or 3.1, 
> they would.

No, they wouldn't. Apple doesn't support versions of Mac OS earlier 
than 10.2. Microsoft doesn't offer support for Windows 3.1 or 95; they 
would also have ceased support for Windows 98 in 2004, were it not for 
customer demand. But again, that's irrelevant to retaining existing Web 
pages about older versions so that people can help themselves. (It 
seems the only reason Apple doesn't have pages about System 6, and 
Microsoft doesn't have pages about Windows 3.0, is that they *didn't 
have Web sites* back then.)

> We are not MS or Apple and don't have resources to deal with
> rotting wiki pages.
> ...

I don't understand what you mean by wiki pages rotting. Is there 
frequent data corruption on the disks where the wiki is stored?

> Our shipped documentation is available and will always be available.

 From what I can tell of reviews of 4.10 and 5.04, 4.10 didn't *have* 
any shipped documentation. And the shipped documentation in 5.04 and 
later refers to the wiki as an additional source of help.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/