> Personally, I don't think I've ever used Wikipedia to learn about an OSS project.
I think I might be part of the silent majority that actually does -- I often use Wikipedia to learn about the origin story of an OSS project. (not random tiny OSS projects, but more established ones)
Project websites don't tell you stuff like the original author, key people, context, adjacent categories of software, the history, the original problem that it was trying to solve, the drama (fights, competitors, disagreements between folks involved), and evolution of the project over time. The Wikipedia article often does.
This type of intelligence is invaluable when evaluating projects/products. If you're not wiki'ing your OSS project, you'd have to google and wade through mailing lists and piece together the story from blogposts, tweets, etc.
I think I might be part of the silent majority that actually does -- I often use Wikipedia to learn about the origin story of an OSS project. (not random tiny OSS projects, but more established ones)
Project websites don't tell you stuff like the original author, key people, context, adjacent categories of software, the history, the original problem that it was trying to solve, the drama (fights, competitors, disagreements between folks involved), and evolution of the project over time. The Wikipedia article often does.
This type of intelligence is invaluable when evaluating projects/products. If you're not wiki'ing your OSS project, you'd have to google and wade through mailing lists and piece together the story from blogposts, tweets, etc.
Here are some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Labs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite