sorbs.net

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Tue Mar 22 16:38:27 UTC 2005


> On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 09:47:00AM +0000, Michael.Dillon at 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






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