Information sources.md

People have grown accustomed to using general-purpose web search engines for finding whatever it is they need to find. While serviceable, this approach:

• involuntarily opts you into participation in their business and research, which relies on its opt-out nature (i. e. including your data by default without asking), and opting out is notoriously difficult or impossible
• scatters information outside of places where it should generally be: there’s a metric ton of blog posts on technical subjects that could make for good documentation pieces, but for whatever reason (difficulty of contribution, difference in opinion of scope, lack of time) it’s not happening

Some other sources to look at:

• Projects of Wikimedia Foundation, most notably Wikipedia – while the quality of information there can often be questionable, especially in non-English ones, it usually works out when looking for an overview “in layman’s terms” and includes references for further lookups
• Kiwix can be seen as a “source of sources”: it maintains an app for browsing knowledge bases offline as well as a library of said knowledge bases for anyone to download and use (the list may be as important as the bases themselves)
• awesome repositoritories on GitHub collect various sources on a number of topics, usually technical; searching GitHub for awesome-$TOPIC (e. g. awesome-git) usually yields useful results
• Stack Exchange is the largest Q&A community on a multitude of different subjects, most prominently around IT, but in other areas as well — it has a wealth of content, but it’s commercial, and as such often compromises the integrity of its community for financial gain
  • Codidact is trying its best to build an open Q&A platform free of commercial motives, it’s by no means big, but it’s the biggest of its kind

On more technical topics:

• Linux command line utilities often come with a manual commonly accessible via man $COMMAND, $COMMAND --help or $COMMAND help. Some utilities have more obscure ways, but these are generally discouraged
• Arch Wiki is a wealth of information on most Linix-related topics, and not just about Arch since much of the software it uses is also available in other Linux distributions and beyond. In contrast with manpages, which are often but a reference manual, it usually outlines more practical information like common uses and issues
• Again on the problem of manpages often being a dry list of all options – utilities like navi, cheat and tldr provide common uses of many utilities in form of complete commands
• Zeal is a documentation browser, inspired by Dash, thar allows you to browse many documentation websites offline at full speed, at the expense of some disk space, although with modern disks this is hardly a huge concern
• AlternativeTo often helps with finding alternatives to various software products, with probably the most common use case being finding an free and/or open-source replacement for something

When publishing knowledge of your own, if at all possible, find a place and format that allows making informed use of said knowledge as quickly as possible.