Edits on GitHub Wiki

(I have tagged this as Get Help because category is required)

I was working through a process as outlined in the GitHub wiki and came across a line that I believed to be in error. Having never worked with a GitHub wiki, I assumed “edit” would introduce a PR like process in which the change was proposed with a diff for review. To my surprise, GitHub just accepted the edit as is.

Diff: Compare revisions · specify/specify7 Wiki · GitHub

Is the GitHub wiki something that is aimed to be a source of truth going forward, or is the long term objective to migrate those topics to the discourse documentation tag? If the GitHub wiki is going to be kept, is this edit flow how you would like it to be? There is a setting to restrict to those with push access.

If access is restricted, would you prefer community feedback/suggestions go through the forum, email, a github issue, or none at all?

Thank you for the edit. Regarding the change:
Line 158 in that wiki file shows “cd doc*”.
It is not very clear since it doesn’t feature the full directory name, but it is supposed to navigate into the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ directory.
Given your edit, that line is no longer necessary, thus I will update the wiki.

Screenshot 2024-07-30 at 17.25.43


Unfortunately, GitHub Wiki does not support pull requests so there is no official way for the community to propose a change.


Both GitHub Wiki and our UI Localization on weblate.com are freely editable - there hasn’t been any abuse so far - in fact, community translations and improvements have been very helpful.

For the future strategy with GitHub Wiki and Discourse, @Grant could you please provide a response?

Hi @markp,

Just as Max stated, we have not experienced any vandalism on the GitHub Wiki (or our Weblate instance) since its inception. Therefore, we have generally trusted the community to make useful and accurate updates.

We have not created any new GitHub Wiki pages since the launch of this forum, and we currently plan to publish all new user-facing documentation to this site. Migrating the content from the GitHub Wiki has been discussed several times, but the decision on how and whether to make that move has not been finalized.

The documentation for editing forms has been expanded and moved to Discourse from the wiki. This platform allows us to facilitate community discussion, easily add multimedia, and perform quick updates with real-time previews.

When time allows, I expect I will migrate all of the pages from the wiki to this site, but there are no plans in place at this time. The Discourse platform offers a wiki feature, but the decision has been made to restrict editing capabilities to staff members only.

My preference is generally for community feedback/suggestions to go through the forum whenever possible, unless the request/issue may include sensitive information, in which case it should be sent via Email. Our developers often prefer a member of our team to create an issue on GitHub, though the community is welcome to do so if they provide enough detail and follow the new issue template.

If a security vulnerability is discovered in Specify, we ask that users report it via the ‘Report a vulnerability’ button on GitHub.

Community suggestions and revisions are welcome in the replies! Thank you so much for your question, useful revision, and for your interest.