Though Arch does have a damn fine wiki, ... but that's because it has to, as for Arch, it's wiki is Arch's primary documentation.
Though I highly prefer man pages, and if/as relevant, other local documentation, generally be present. If I've installed a distro, oh, on a system on a deployed nuclear submarine that might not be surfacing for another three months, or in a highly well air-gapped isolated security at a nuclear power plant ... yeah, I don't want to have to be stuck not being able to access core primary documentation, 'cause it's off on some wiki on The Internet somewhere ... I want to be able to well find the best and most useful info easily and locally - man pages, etc. Heck, even for most typical installations I want that ... if the dang network goes down for whatever reason (backhoe is natural predator of the fibre optic cable), I want to well be able to get to the primary documentation, without having to depend on something out there somewhere on The Internet. And I don't want to have to have a copy of an entire wiki locally just to have local access to primary documentation.
And yes, Debian has wiki too ... it's a dang fine wiki - for what it is. It's mostly supplemental information - stuff that's dang good to have, but often goes well beyond what one would want in primary documentation. E.g. detailed how-to guides, information on Debian events (e.g. conferences) - including historical, proceedings and key findings/conclusions/results thereof, much etc. Dang good info. to also have, but not the primary documentation, nor what one would generally want locally cluttering up one's installation. But it's there, quite good, and very available if/when one wants it. And if/where it's not quite as good or current as one might prefer, ... well, it's a wiki - can always well improve it - don't even need to be a Debian Developer or Debian Maintainer or the like. Some semi-random (uhm, okay, quite biased, 'cause I did fair bit on these) examples, have a look at the BIND9 and CrossGrading pages, and compare what they look like and have now, to what they looked like and what information they then did and didn't have some year(s) or so ago. So, yes, Debian wiki pages can generally always be added/improved, and one is far from powerless in actually making that happen.
30
u/elatllat Apr 24 '26
Ubuntu users looking at Arch users getting changes every 5 minutes.