[News] Handmade Wiki Released

Abner Coimbre
Handmade Folks,

The early Handmade Wiki is out. This is an exciting year because we have almost zero content, and we get to see a wikipedia grow from effectively nothing. I've never had that experience before. Also, project owners get a wiki of their own, configurable in their Project Settings. Handmade Network's roadmap for 2018 is to create a self-sustaining HMN Wikipedia. File bug reports here and join our Thursday stream at 5PM EST.

Andrew Chronister, the wiki's developer, has a few things to say:
chronaldragon
Handmade Network Wikis, like those on Wikipedia, MediaWiki, and other encyclopedic sites, are open to write and edit for anyone with an account. This
is great for collaborative, community-driven work because nobody knows a tool,
language, game, or project better than the people who use it and interact with
it every day. We also realize that Wikis are filling a niche for project owners
as well, providing them with a space to post reference information about their
project that doesn't fit the blog post model. To this end, we've also added the
ability for project owners and site staff to lock articles that are fine just as
they are.

As for the global Handmade Network wiki, we hope to foster new tutorials,
reference material, helpful tips, and guides that will help novice and
experienced programmers alike. Spend a week learning about an obscure OpenGL function? Write up an article on your findings and post it on the wiki! Found an edge case in the Win32 API? Add it to the list! Not sure how to get started with GUI programming on linux? We hope that by the end of 2018 we'll have built up enough resources to provide a good jumping off point for a wide variety of programming and software engineering topics to help everyone grow as programmers and give back to the community.

As Abner has talked about previously, we've also been working with long-time
community volunteers to write some tutorial material for folks just getting into
the world of lower-level programming. These articles will gradually appear on
the wiki over the course of this year, but they'll by no means be exhaustive,
and no writing is perfect when first published! If you see a way to improve any
article on the wiki, don't hesitate to hit that Edit button and make your mark.
If you're not sure about it, you can leave a comment on the Talk page and you
can discuss with other folks who are invested in the article what the best
course of revision is.

As always, new features might be a bit unstable for a bit, so let us know if you
find anything a little janky or unintuitive. We'll be working all this month to
smooth things out and try to make the wiki system the best it can be.

So how do you contribute to the handmade wiki?

  • Register an account on the network and head over to the wiki.

  • We have a set of interesting article suggestions here. Start creating page titles with some initial contributions.

  • Find existing forum threads or blog posts that you think are useful knowledge for developers, and create permanent wiki entries out of them

  • Write your own entries about a topic you're an expert in, or have a peculiar insight into, typically at a lower level of abstraction than is usually taught.

  • Contribute to the wiki of a specific project page as a way of giving back to the creator. You are free to do so unless a project owner locks you out (I doubt this would happen often!)

  • The Handmade Dev team is able to lock pages, and so can project owners for their own wikis.

    We reserve the right to lock or delete content if a particular page gets out of hand.

    There are rules and guidelines we'll put in place but only after we see how the content tends to grow, so brace yourself: it's going to be the handmade wild west for a good chunk of the year. And you're a part of it!

    Log on and start writing!

    Yours,
    Abner
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    We now have collapsible sections, dubbed Asides. We considered this important right from the wiki's inception because diving into lower level topics is sometimes best upon a second or third reading.