using a wiki for documentation (and introducing short-term beginning BSD admin book project)

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Over a year and half ago, I asked the DragonFly documentation workers to 
choose to just keep their handbook in progress in CVS. This was because 
there were two versions -- one in a wiki and one in DocBook in CVS -- that 
were growing independently (but were same originally). We didn't have 
tools (or time) to keep in sync and we didn't have tools (or time) to 
convert the wiki content into nice printable format.

Since then parts of the wiki disappeared and were lost and weren't 
committed back to the CVS. There has been random improvements to the CVS 
version. There have been patches submitted but I think never committed.

In hindsight, probably just doing the work in a wiki probably would have 
been best (other than the fact that original wiki, I think, was turned 
off). Because a wiki makes it easier and quicker for a larger community to 
contribute back. At least that is what I am hoping ...

A collaborative, short-term open source authoring project to quickly write 
a book covering the basics from the 2005 BSDA Certification Requirements 
Document was recently started. The BSD Certification Group's BSDA (BSD 
Associate) Certification is for BSD Unix system administrators with light 
to moderate skills.

Using a wiki interface, authors, reviewers and readers all contribute to 
complete the book by the end of February. This bsdwiki contains over a 
hundred pages each with the topics defined by the BSD Certification Group.

A PDF in book format is periodically generated from this wiki content 
(which is converted to LaTeX).

To contribute, please join at http://bsdwiki.reedmedia.net/

The book is mostly generic BSD for beginning administrators, but there are 
a few topics that need some DragonFly-specific attention. If any of you 
can help, it would be appreciated.

Note that this is a short-term project, so no long term commitment is 
needed. And also any content in this new wiki is appropriately licensed 
and easily re-used by DragonFly.