Category talk:Hardware

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Latest comment: 3 February 2023 by Erus Iluvatar in topic State of hardware pages in the wiki

State of hardware pages in the wiki

There are many hardware pages in the wiki. Since there are so many, it is time to have some sort of place to discuss changes.

What even are hardware pages?

Hardware pages are pages documenting how well a specific piece of hardware works on Arch Linux. It documents tweaks, fixes, hacks and all this. They are certainly useful and do belong into the ArchWiki in my opinion.

Overview

There are approximately 450-500 hardware pages in the wiki. The majority of them are Laptop pages. There are also pages for modems, docks, exotic USB devices and more.

Unfortunately many of them are bad. There are 441 pages which are marked with Template:Laptop style. There are roughly 450 laptop pages since not all of them are bad.

Solved problems

  • The Laptop page guidelines have been introduced to bring an end to unique (in a bad way) laptop pages.
  • Many laptop pages have already been flagged.
  • The laptop vendor pages (e.g Laptop/Dell) got a very basic cleanup and some fixes.

Current problems

Since laptop pages are the vast majority of all hardware pages, we have been focusing on them.

  • The Laptop page guidelines is mostly finished but still lacks a bit of content and other style-related stuff.
  • There are no guidelines for other sorts of hardware pages. We are still not sure about Chromebooks and Tablet PC devices.
  • There is no general hardware page listing all the sorts of hardware pages one can find in the wiki.
  • Many old laptop pages exist. They are, in my opinion, beyond repair and should just be archived. To fix those pages one needs to have the hardware since many infos are missing from those pages.
  • There are some pointless redirects which have to be added and deleted. They can only be deleted if all links have been fixed.
  • What is the scope of hardware pages in the wiki? Should only laptop pages and peripherals be documented here? What about other hardware such as mainboards? This will probably transform the ArchWiki into a hardware DB but is still worth discussing since there is no official rule on this.
  • The laptop vendor pages are extremely messy and basically spreadsheets. They are also inconsistent, vague and hard to clean up.
    • The date column contains a lot of invalid values, such as "Yes/"No" or "Current"/"Newest", which gets old quickly.
    • Some pages, especially Laptop/Acer are just horrible and the table size got blown up by the amount of content in some rows.
    • There is no standard. Should they use table cell templates?
    • Unfortuantely these pages are very hard to fix, too. Some of the rows with insane amount of content does not contain vital information needed to migrate them to a separate page but it might be counterproductive to just remove them since knowledge gets lost, no matter how ugly the table is. Maybe it is possible to archive them somehow? This would result in an ugly spreadsheet archive though.
    • Some laptop vendor pages also use separate sections instead of insane tables, which might be a bit better but these sections are still lacking vital information which are needed to migrate them to a proper dedicated laptop page.

-- NetSysFire (talk) 07:27, 11 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think it's also worth mentioning that some of the laptops listed on Laptop/Lenovo have their own section rather than a separate article, e.g., Laptop/Lenovo#Lenovo ThinkPad T440p (I'm not sure if this is the case with other laptop vendor pages). I think it would be ideal to move these sections into their own pages, but as previously mentioned, many are lacking the necessary hardware information, so migrating those sections to high quality laptop pages would be difficult since you would need to have the actual laptop. -- Flyingpig (talk) 20:58, 12 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I agree. Laptop/Other and Laptop/HP have those sections, too. -- NetSysFire (talk) 06:30, 13 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I had not seen this discussion before: I've tried my hand at getting the Laptop/Vendor pages into a less ugly mess, but having at least a clear definitions (maybe a template to transclude at the top of each page?) for what goes in which column in each case would help to maintain them in the long run. --Erus Iluvatar (talk) 16:50, 12 July 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
For anyone reading this, I've started a draft of the definition for the table cells at Template talk:Laptops table header. --Erus Iluvatar (talk) 14:39, 3 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Flagging hardware pages

These are two different topics: Flagging hardware pages because they violate the Laptop page guidelines (unfortunately there are no hardware page guidelines yet) or because they violate the e.g style guidelines.

Avoid flagging partially complaint but very new (less than a week or two old) with Template:Laptop style, give the author some time to sort the page out. This does not apply if you think that the author did not read the laptop page guidelines.

Unfortunately hardware pages tend to have severe style issues and especially the older pages may be beyond repair. I usually tend to only mark them with Template:Out of date since fixing them is hard if you do not have the hardware. If someone who looks for style issues can not fix the rest and the contributor who fixed up the page in terms of style issues, which is going to end up archived soon anyways, may be disappointed because they just wasted their time.

Tell me what you think about it and if something can be done in a better or more efficient way.

-- NetSysFire (talk) 23:24, 28 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]