[xattt]

I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves.

The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.

[kartoffelsaft]

Most man pages are written for someone who knows pretty precisely what they want to do, but don't recall which nobs to turn in the program to get that done. The Arch wiki instead focuses on someone who has a vague idea of what tools to use but doesn't know how those tools operate.

I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.

[bityard]

Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common.

(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)

[bombcar]

man pages got replaced by --help in many, many cases.

GNU info was an interesting experiment but it got replaced by online wikis.

[QuantumNoodle]

Anecdotally the arch wiki expands on the vauge man pages, often with examples for cases actually used by people. And they are much more easily accessible to modify and have instant gratification of publishing changes. Publishing to upstream man pages of a project, need to wait for it to trickle down.

[ACS_Solver]

Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.

In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.

GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.

man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.

Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.

Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.