I have observed that XDA folks aren’t much interested in FOSS ecosystem. However, there is lot of tweak’ish and hack ish things possible with apps on fdroid.
I am thinking of creating a community built definitive wiki, mostly like ArchWiki, to collect and share such tweak - hack things as well as HOWTOs, so two purposes are fulfilled.
We can share and find out tweaks and HOWTOs we find, so technical users, nerds and geeks will benefit.
With HOWTOs, people can realise what they can do with open source apps and it will perhaps be useful to increase our outreach.
I don’t have any outline how it should be designed, like ArchWiki, or TLDP, or even WikiHow, that will be fine.
But this should not bother people already working on fdroid. We can build a passionate comnunity that shares amazing techniques and tweaks they find.
I am amazed why ad filled poor quality apps are way more popular than robust FOSS apps. Moreover, XDA is rather some kind of “bloat” nowadays filled with UI designers and modding trash. We can create a better community or at least, a better source of information.
This is just at planning stage and let us freely discuss about it, ranging from name and website to content outlines.
P.S: tweak should be treated with some broad meaning here. It may range from app based howtos to clever hacks w.r.t android ecosystem.
Creating a Wiki sounds like a cool idea, however I think, that the scope has to be defined carefully.
Do you want to create a user-oriented wiki which contains different use-cases and then lists, how certain apps can help the user in such situation, or do you want to have a developer-oriented wiki, which lists tools, workflows and tweaks that help during development of an app?
I think those are both sensible but distinct topics. The user-oriented wiki might teach a user, how they can torify their messaging apps traffic by using Orbots proxy feature for example, while the developer-wiki teaches how to integrate an app with Orbot on a deeper level by utilizing the NetCipher library instead.
In case of the developer-oriented wiki I’d like to see articles that teach developers to build better FOSS apps. Some ideas are:
Links to projects that encourage cooperation of apps (like openintents.org)
General advice on topics that are of interest to free software projects (like receiving push messages without GAPPS)
Well, I was actually talking about a user oriented wiki…
For example, let us take archwiki, besides guidance about Arch Linux, they have nice information about different software applications as well.
However, since android is not just for powerusers, we have to be little more generic, maybe like TLDP HOWTOs.
I think articles may range from “I2P howto”, “Addi mobile mathematics tutorial” or to “How to download all PDF files on a site at once using termux”… That is just fine since many users need such techniques.
Or probably we would create a seperate wiki page for each app and List all tweak-ish techniques or somewhat technically complicated tutorials under that page, with seperate header.
Another purpose is that we can find, as powerusers or normal ones, some ideas that we yet have not come across.
By the way, when a user searches “How to download YouTube videos on android?”, he / she should come across this wiki rather than going through shady websites and apps.
That would be definitely good. I have got a similar idea several months ago, more comprehensive I remember, but unfortunately I can’t remember it clearly now.[1]
Considering the target of the wiki, I think both normal users and advanced users can be covered, given enough resources: just put information of different levels in different pages, with a link in the basic level article to the more advanced one, or just put them in the same page under different sections.
As to the structure of the wiki, I think the one of ArchWiki and Gentoo Wiki is fairly good. Softwares have their own pages, and general topics like blocking ads have information about different suitable softwares and other aspects in other pages, etc.
[1] An ambitious program of information about an entire Android ecosystem based on F-Droid or so, I guess.
It would be great to have an F-Droid wiki following the model of the Arch and Debian wikis. It should have a clearly defined scope, but I don’t think it needs to be too limited. I think we could make it about all things Free Software and Android, with a bit of Free Software mobile (e.g. Purism Librem5, etc).
About where it actually runs, it could be wiki.f-droid.org. We could migrate the existing wiki there, then open it up again to allow anyone to create an account. I think it would be nice to have the default syntax be Markdown, since Markdown is used throughout the Android world, while MediaWiki syntax is rarely used. It could still be running MediaWiki, then it would just use a plugin to make the default syntax: https://github.com/bharley/mw-markdown/blob/master/README.md
