On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 09:47:00AM +0000, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
There are a lot of people in this industry who claim to be engineers but they're not. In fact, I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as an Internet network engineer because there are no published best practices for Internet network engineering
If there were a centralized site to which to contribute such things, a site based on MediaWiki, for example (the engine which drives Wikipedia), would the members of this list contribute to it?
For those who have never heard of Wikipedia, it is an online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. However, it is not a free-for-all. There is some structure to it and it has evolved to the point where where it really does provide accurate and comprehensive information at least equal to the big paper encyclopedias. It could actually help us solve the problem of getting best practices published. However, the Mediawiki tool itself is not the solution to the problem, only a vehicle towards a solution. We would need a large percentage of NANOG members to write (or review and correct) sections relating to their expertise. And Jay, before you put up this site, I suggest that you think long and hard about who will run/promote the site. The technical aspect of getting MediaWiki running on a server are trivial. The real challenge is in promoting the site and getting a high enough calibre of contributor. That will mean repeated status update presentations at NANOG meetings and a lot of chasing people in hallway discussions to get them to contribute. However, it could work and I'm glad that you suggested this because it is a nice incremental and evolutionary technique to collect and publish the knowledge of the "profession". --Michael Dillon