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by timeforcomputer 823 days ago
Nice! I want to do something similar and map my understanding of Linux. I find some diagrams on Wikipedia fascinating (example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Graphics_Stack_20..., but more to do with the user library ecosystem rather than kernel and program runtime). These diagrams make me want to learn about each part and be able to comprehend in principle what is happening on my machine. Eventually...
1 comments

Any diagram by ScotXW on Wikipedia is somewhere between misleading and completely wrong, and they're a constant pain on the Linux graphics community.

If you're curious about the details in this case, ScotXW confuses EGL and OpenGL, the arrows aren't quite right, and the labels aren't quite right either (DRM is labeled "hardware-specific" but KMS isn't? The label for "hardware specific Userspace interface to hardware specific direct rendering manager" is quite weird), and some important boxes are flat out missing. It's nitpicking for sure, but when the diagram goes out of its way to add extremely weird details, it demands nitpicking.

Nobody in the Linux graphics community would draw the diagram like this.

I remember when Wikipedia first became popular, there were a lot of warnings about how you couldn't trust the information because "anyone could edit it". I feel like, at least to my level of understanding whatever I'm reading about, it's been sufficient and I've never identified something wrong/inaccurate (except for perhaps recent news or recently debated political topics). This is the first time that I've seen that downside of Wikipedia, as I use it for understanding things like this and never would've known that the diagram I was learning from was wrong. Thanks for commenting this, it's good to know
The specific article is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_.... I can understand the "multiple issues" section here, this seems super-technical in a certain way in comparison to what I usually see on Wikipedia (although wk does get very technical on very specific isolated things in e.g. math, usually non-theory tech pages are a summary), but I still found it motivating to dig into Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if it was removed.

I love wikipedia and I read to procrastinate by reading the articles for everything I am interested in so I have found quite a lot of factually incorrect information or statements of fact which are really philosophical opinions. However usually these problems coexist with a certain change in writing style (loss of formatting, grammatical errors, random capitalizations, change of tone, etc.). I find I haven't found many problems with content written in the usual "wikipedia" style, so I assume the hardcore wk editors who enforce this style care a lot about factual accuracy. However I don't read enough outside of wikipedia so I wouldn't know if everything is correct...

(actually now that I think about, maybe I am more likely to agree with things in the wikipedia style. But I think the style errors and factual errors are at least a bit correlated.)