Recent modifications on a wiki page

[Andrea Lazzarotto]

Hi there,

I am writing here following a brief consultation happened via the IRC
channel of the Ubuntu Documentation Team.

Recently I found a page dedicated to BIOSes of Samsung laptops, which
happens to be the brand I use. In particular, the following page states:

This is because for many models, Samsung does not provide via their
website *the
option to see the latest BIOS version,* the release notes for a given BIOS
version, or allow one to *download a dedicated, OS vendor independent BIOS
upgrade method.* Instead, they provide a Windows only software update
program (SW Update), that is used to both check if a BIOS update is
available

This information is not exactly precise. It is actually possible to look up
information regarding the latest available BIOS version using Ubuntu. It is
also possible to avoid using the SW Update Windows program and directly
fetch a BIOS upgrade executable. Such executable is in exe format, however
it might work in a FreeDOS environment as it is routinely done with other
vendors (e.g. DELL), although this was not tested.

Given the lack of precision and no mentions of these facts, I decided to
contribute more information in the wiki, which resulted in the following:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SamsungBIOS?action=recall&rev=83

One other user, penalvch, rapidly corrected a mistake I made in one of the
rows of the table after writing the wrong release date of the BIOS version.
Soon after that, I contacted him via email to apologize for the error in
the date and mentioning the fact that I included information on how to:

   - determine the latest BIOS version of any Samsung model without using
   Windows
   - finding out the URL to the BIOS upgrade exe which contains the ROM to
   be flashed (even though it’s unclear how to extract it, more on this later)

I didn’t get any reply, however in response I started to see all of my
contribution firstly vandalized to make the text less clear (e.g. cutting
sentences) and then completely reverted to the old version of the page, as
if I “dared” to touch a page “owned” by someone else.

I’m no expert in the Ubuntu Documentation Team, hence I believed the rules
were somewhat similar to those of Wikipedia, i.e. that nobody is the
“owner” of a page and that before dropping entire sections of a page and
starting a revert war there should be some constructive conversation.

Maybe I am wrong and nothing applies here, in this case tell me and I will
be sorry for touching somebody else’s property, plus rest assured you won’t
see any other contribution on the wiki from my side.

Regarding the material I added, I later discovered that, in accordance with
my view that it’s possible to gather such information from Ubuntu, two
Linux programs on Launchpad do the exact same thing:

   -
   https://github.com/damianmoore/samsung-bios-check/blob/master/samsung_bios_check.py
   - https://github.com/YKonovalov/bios-downloader

Moreover, this forum topic discusses how to extract the BIOS ROM that can
later be flashed with the AMI Flash utility:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/samsung-laptops-roll-back-bios-updates.696197/

Such flashing tool has a Linux version:
https://www.wimsbios.com/amiflasher.jsp

What is the best way to deal with this issue? Can the dropped material be
restored?

Thank you.

Best regards
​
-- 
Andrea Lazzarotto
http://andrealazzarotto.com
http://lazza.dk
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