As someone who has spent the last two days flailing about to find the best XO wiki pages, your page was a welcome relief. Linux documentation in general “emerges”, and it can be a source of frustration for those not used to it.

I know you’ve written about wikis as documentation, and we see the problems. The documentation misses some things, doesn’t list the latest status or specifically how to do things. Also, there’s a lot of contradictory information. Even after looking through the wiki I assumed there weren’t much in the way of textbooks and then I happened upon a whole list of ebook libraries . I’m assuming that they’re just more focused on overseas marketing and internal development and not on user documents (the open source world is used to relying on community-driven documentation).

Interestingly, I judged an STC competition entry produced in AuthorIT recently and was sold by its versatility. I think the OLPC are more comfortable with open source documentation methods even if they recognize its inadequacies. Another problem with wiki documentation is that it gives status reports of not-yet-finished items, and that obscures the list of things which are completed and user-ready.

I haven’t signed up for a wiki account yet, although I guess I suppose I will. I’m starting a site for my user group with tips & tricks. The question then becomes, if the tips & tricks are so useful, don’t they belong inside the main wiki itself?

One source of frustration to me is the lack of response from them about buying 100+ devices. For that volume, the price falls to $299, and that is much more affordable.

By the way, you might want to put teleread on your RSS reader for December and January. David and I will be blogging heavily about OLPC as it pertains to ebooks.