Teh Guide

Teh Guide is a little wiki created around September 5th, 2023, to document things in a single organized source of information.

It was also inspired by a fictional guide to life, universe, and everything.

Additionally, this wiki serves as a repository of information that Roman hasn't been able to find on the internet, or if he found it, the information was significantly obscured by ads, access restrictions, or an unclear interface.

In the past, he would write a blog post on his blog, www.coderoman.com. That worked fine, but didn't seem like the best way to share reference-style information.

Later on, he started using stackexchange websites like www.stackoverflow.com to share the questions he was researching and the answers he found. However, the editors on those sites were overzealous with blocking the information provided, and after a few occasions of his questions + answers being closed or incorrectly marked as off-topic, he decided that it wasn't worth his time trying to contribute to those websites.

• An example of this was his question about how to create a chat group without a 2nd participant in WhatsApp, as described in the WhatsApp article. The question was marked as off-topic in the webapps stackexchange, and the editor said it should be sent to the WhatsApp developers as a feature request. This prevented Roman from finding, or being able to share, a workaround that people can use to accomplish this need.

Roman thought Wikipedia was amazing. He wished it wasn't so against being a guidebook, or so strict in so many ways. If that was the case, he would have contributed there instead of creating and updating this website.

Wikipedia's five pillars included the following directives that he had issues with:

• It should not be “an indiscriminate collection of information.”
  • Roman is an advocate against deletionism and requiring significant notability. He thought the high standards in WP end up being disrespectful to the people contributing to WP and those peoples' time.
  • He also thought that with the right amount of organization and editing, almost nothing that is contributed in good faith and of sound mind needs to be deleted. There is mostly no technical or financial constraints to storing unlimited amounts of textual information.
• All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is controversial or is about a living person. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong on Wikipedia.
  • While Roman mostly agreed with this, he thought that the standards are too high on WP. He thought that certain leeway for source reliability and editor interpretation should be allowed.

These were some interesting alternatives to wikipedia, but there were various issues with each one.

• RationalWiki
• Citizendium
• Infogalactica

The word “teh” was inspired by a t-shirt that was featured in the webcomic www.questionablecontent.net.

• www.skool.com - seems like it might do what this wiki is looking to accomplish, but better. Roman's worry though is it still might devolve into editors having too much personal bias like at stackoverflow.