On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 12:20:14PM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
Speaking just for myself, I'd welcome discussion of operational and design issues specific to edge networks here, and newbie questions are useful as well. If those with experience don't share knowledge with those with less experience, we'll just have the same mistakes being made over and over again.
And, in that vein, I'd like to repost, to the list, a query which I sent offlist to a couple dozen people last week, and only got 3 replies: == The Background == It came up on NANOG a week or so ago, not for the first time, that it might contribute to the general well being of the net if the (hopefully) not insubstantial section of the network operations audience who *want* to run their networks better, but don't know *how* yet had some place to go to gather that information. Having acquired some experience in the last 6 to 9 months about the usefulness of wiki software (and particularly MediaWiki, which is used to run the half-million article Wikipedia and is fairly well tuned for large audiences and easy administration) for facilitating distributed knowledge capture, I suggested that it might be A Good Idea to set up a wiki site for this purpose. As it happens, the Wikipedia people themselves have a facility for this sort of thing. It was named Wikicities, because when Jimmy Wales thought up the idea, Geocities was pretty popular. He has since changed his opinion, but, of course, it's hard to rename such a site. == The Pitch == Since they have a finite investment in labor to set up and in network costs to run such sites, and also an investment in the brand name, they want to have a pretty good idea that people proposing such a site have a sufficiently large crew of writers, editors, and wranglers to make a given site viable before they'll approve it. At Michael Dillon's suggestion, I've sifted through the last 5 months or so of NANOG traffic, and picked out the addresses of those of you whom I either know (mostly from the list, admittedly), or whose chops seem obvious from the traffic on the list. [ and only three replied :-} ] All I need at this point, as tacky as it sounds, is your names. :-) If you think you'd be willing to contribute in some fashion to such a site, either by way of original writing, editing or commenting on other people's work, or by contributing original writing you've already composed, please let me know. In not more than a week, I'll count up the noses, and get in touch with the Wikicities people. == The Reminder == As with all good sources of knowledge, wikis provide metadata on the provenance of the information contained on them, and visitors are expected to make use of it when deciding how -- and how much -- to make use of the information they find there. Wikipedia has developed a fairly good set of procedures for coping with the situation wherein the information on a page is disputed or controversial, and the other situations experienced on a public wiki (I propose, if they'll let me, to make the wiki registered-user write only), but those situations *will* happen -- just making sure everyone has their expectations strapped on straight. If people want to contribute finished papers, those can be protected so that their form does not change, but in general, the information on the site will be subject to continuous editing and improvement -- with all changes attributed, of course. If you'd like to help out on this, or make suggestions, or if you think I'm completely off my rocker, please drop me a note back. And note that I'm not making this a NANOG project per se; I expect that the email, anti-spam, RBL, and other crowds will have useful things to contribute as well; I merely don't follow those crowds as closely. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me