OK a lot of heated comments here...
I think a central wiki is very important, for many reasons.
Suppose I want to know what my options are for multicore programming, as I asked a little while ago on this list. Where do I go? I can do a google search, and find some stackoverflow answers relevant to 2008, some websites with code that may or may not have been maintained -- it's a mess. What I *want* people to find is the ocaml wiki, which will have a page on different multicore methods, discussions of their pluses and minuses, and a link to the proposal for the new multicore runtime.
Now suppose I want to find out what a good build system is for ocaml. Honestly, until I looked at the documentation for ocp-build (yesterday), I had no idea what the different systems were. I didn't know, for example, that oasis used ocamlbuild. That's exactly the kind of thing that's perfect to go in a wiki. We have so many build systems in ocaml, and no way to compare them.
Another application: when we get to documenting the typechecker, a lot of that code probably relies on understanding some type theory. It's silly (and impractical) to stuff all of that knowledge into the code itself, but makes perfect sense to do so on a wiki (referring to wikipedia where necessary).
None of these ideas are new. Wikis exist for other languages, and they exist for a reason -- they're part of the thriving ecosystem of a language.
Now regarding previous wiki efforts: There are 1,650 subscribers on the r/ocaml reddit, and about 2-4 lingering on the page at any one time. Contrast this to r/haskell's 15,000 subscribers and ~60 users on the page at a time, and you get a sense of the user ratio. If we say only 1/20th of ocaml users are on r/ocaml, we get around 30,000 users in the world (very rough figure, of course). Bottom line: there aren't many ocaml users (yet). Now how many of these users are active participants in the community? Out of those, how many feel confident enough to contribute to documentation? Out of those, how many find the time? You quickly whittle it down to very few people.
This means that any high level documentation/survey/discussion system (aka a wiki) needs to be centralized and not fragmented. I didn't even know about the 2 wikis for camlp4 and ocamlbuild. Had I not asked on this list, I would probably never have found the compiler internals and compiler hacking wikis. As a contributor, before I contribute to any of those wikis, I ask myself:
- Is this the right wiki to contribute to?
- Will my effort be wasted because this wiki is really dead?
- Will anyone see my contribution?
A centralized wiki solves all of these problems. People know where to contribute their input. They know it will be seen, precisely because it's centralized. And it builds up momentum, because people see other people contributing, so they feel like contributing as well. By concentrating the user base on one front, you make the most of what you have as well as grow that base, since new users looking into ocaml will find their answers easily.
. Seriously, that's the best place for it to be. However, it doesn't seem to me that the process that currently exists for markdown files can suit a wiki-type repository. Here are the features of a wiki: