I know, I’m not trying to order anyone around, I’m just trying to voice my support for moving things in the right direction.
Personally I’d rather see some user-friendly access to the documentation restored before a full migration to Git. I’m willing to help, though I’m probably not a good fit for any long-term maintenance.
It would be helpful if a message explaining the situation could be posted at the rawpedia address. Otherwise we can expect more threads popping up here and elsewhere as new folks encounter the issue.
To be fair, he literally did step up and provide a workaround plus a dump.
Actually, putting a message on the RawTherapee main web page would be a very good idea, especially for people who might want to take a look at RawTherapee for the first time, so they don’t go away confused or disappointed when they discover that the documentation is (for now) a dead link.
I have a dump of the wiki and I’ve converted it to markdown. Can anyone create a new repo under the beep namespace or is it time to start the Rawtherapee Org and put it there?
The markdown will need some work in order to get it working well, but the content looks intact to me.
Awesome! I’m happy to volunteer some time to polishing the markdown
Meanwhile the RawPedia stuff on my site is still there:
The pdf and an HTML.
This is very good news.
Any questions?
A large part of the documentation is the result of the cooperation of an Anglo-Saxon translator and myself - whom I thank, both for the translation, but especially for confronting the C++ code with the user’s realities, their understanding, the ergonomics of the interface. This does not happen by itself.
For example for Selective Editing, CIECAM, Abstract profile. It is a considerable work that has spread over several years. Here again, the new system should offer more ease, but how to coordinate and validate… Beyond saying it is like a Pull-Request. 
You mention replacing Beep6581 with something else (Rawtherapee.org…or other). It’s certainly not me who’s going to do that, it’s totally out of my skills. Some questions though:
Thank you, and excuse my bad english.
Jacques
Yes, they are preserves.
Yes, although we may need to massage the wikilinkins to get them to work.
This is one of the issues I brought up as being worse than on media wiki and the answer was “we’ll author in English and translate”. So I don’t have a great answer about that, sorry.
We can help with the github migration, of course. I only mention this because beep6581 has been far less present as of late. I have a pm with him and told him we have migrated the docs like a week ago but I haven’t received a response about where to push a new repo… An org could mean that others who are more present can be more expedient. Of course you don’t have to do any of that and I’m happy to wait for beep6581 to get back to me.
RawPedia is back online, thanks to Gabor.
Ah, we were really confused about what happened.
At any rate, now that JDC started editing it again since its come back up, my previous dump and conversion are now out of date.
The community should really decide what need to happen. If the migration off of media wiki is going to happen, we should freeze the content until the migration is complete.
It is true that I have updated Rawpedia with the latest changes in progress (since october 2024) so that users have online information that is more or less consistent with the changes made or in progress. And excuse me if it was not necessary to do it, for your work (dump and conversion)… sorry 
I will stop there, even if other information would be necessary. For example "Abstract profile - and contrast enhancement, Gamut compression… and I’m only talking about the changes I was involved in, but there are others like Framing, etc. I’ve got nothing against it, but the fact that English will now be the basis of documentation raises the problem of developers who - like me, and I’m not the only one - don’t have English as their basic vocabulary.
How long will the migration last…
But we can change with your dump and conversion, and add my last changes after. No problème
Nevertheless some poorly informed points are critical, for example on “how to compile”, has not been updated for months and makes for those who follow what is written, compilation impossible (for example Libraw, libjxl, autotools, autoreconf…). And I’m not the best person to make those changes.
Jacques
It isn’t a big deal. But some decisions should be made as to what the project is doing. @Morgan_Hardwood is sort of back and sending us pixls folks PMs saying one thing, and it doesn’t seem like he is communicating that back to you all.
I just want everyone to be on the same page so we are moving in the same direction; right now it appears that there are many different pages.
One of the major problems with Rawtherapee (and Rawpedia) is a lack of coordination. I will be told that this is how free software works.
I checked all my messages, but nothing on the Rawpedia topic
For me, no problem, I will stop the updates there, hoping that quick and common decisions will be taken.
But, given the recent incidents, I am keeping a backup of the essential addition that I have just made for GHS, in Rawpedia format.
Best regards
Jacques
Dear Jacques, you have always been very humble regarding your English, but I really cannot remember any case when understanding your comments was hindered by your command of the language. I understand that writing in English, for a non-native speaker (like you and me) is slower than communicating in our mother tongues. For darktable, Mica and the others have always encouraged us others to just write - they would take care of fixing mistakes. I think even if you write in French, and machine-translate to English, then give it for someone for review, would be a possible way forward. The important thing is to have tools documented by those ‘in the know’ - which is of course not as much fun as writing code. Darktable has the same issues. (As you know, I’m a darktable user, but RT was my first editor, and I check it out from time to time (‘you never forget the first’).)
I’m glad that RawPedia is back, and that development is also progressing. I have quite a bit of reading to do, now that the docs are available again.
Thank you for your comment
The problem of documentation is far from simple, apart from the media aspect (IP address, server…)
On the one hand, there’s the problem of the developer’s language and, on the other, that of the official language, English. Whether it’s an automatic translator (DeepL, Google, etc.) or a human translator, the question arises as to the technical vocabulary and the accuracy and respect for the meaning of the initial purposes and content. In the case of a human translator - who needs to be found - it’s not a given (I know a few - almost - bilinguals) that the person used to translating literary or economic documents is proficient in digital photography.
On the other hand, it would be highly desirable for this “translation” to be accompanied by a dialogue:
These two aspects can lead to a reworking of the GUI, but also of the algorithm in certain cases.
The third point concerns the content itself:
Should we produce complete, separate documents? For different populations ? etc. In the case of the last GHS document, everything is mixed up with a completely arbitrary bias on my part.
Of course, using Pull-Requests, for example, will make it possible to expand and share content. But the same questions will arise:
Of course, AI can also appear…
But in the end, who will arbitrate, validate and on what basis?
And who, when and how are updates made?
Another not insignificant question. Does the new Rawpedia system (Hugo, etc.) have a powerful search engine?
How does one know that something exists? For example, who knew about “Rawtherapee Processing Challenge Feedback?” How do you search for something other than the obvious keywords? Will the system recognize free text, and of course give relevant answers as Firefox or Google do?
Indirectly, this raises the question of Rawtherapee’s architecture - both internal and visible via the GUI. What’s in what? For example, the new “Contrast Enhancement” in Abstract profile (Color Tab) is entirely Wavelet code - the function is embedded inside the ‘ipwavelet.cc’ code, but the GUI interface - simplified so as not to scare people - is not in Wavelet levels (Advanced Tab). What correlation do we make between the usage inherited from our habits…since 2006, the practices we (who?) wish to promote? and the architecture of the ‘engine’ and ‘GUI’ code.
Jacques
Good point. Wavelet processing in the GIMP is far more simple than in RawTherapee (5.8, haven’t looked in 5.11 yet).
These are all important points. But they’re not unique to RawTherapee. I think these same issues, in different combinations, apply to many Free Software projects. Probably only the developers themselves know enough to write perfectly accurate documents, and even then only in their own language. And even if they have time and energy to do this, the documentation may be best suited to other highly technical users or developers, rather than new users without the same technical background.
In English we have an expression, “perfection is the enemy of the good” (which we probably took from another language!). It means a perfect solution may be so difficult to achieve that we won’t even try. And if we don’t try, we won’t be able to make a good solution. I think this may be a concern here!
It’s your project, and the most important thing is that you need to be comfortable with how it is documented and presented. But there are a few folks here and on github that have offered to help out. Whatever we can contribute won’t be perfect, but it might be good. And hopefully it would improve over time.
Jacques,
Thank you again for your documentation efforts. Writing technical documentation is its own craft, one that we can’t expect our technical experts and coders to also provide. My wife built her career in high tech may years ago by being the one in her work group who could understand the developers well enough to turn their thoughts into well-written documentation. The question you raise about who reviews and who makes final decisions on what and how is no different for documentation than for code or GUI. Each open-source project seems to have its own approach or culture that determine how this is done for code, but often not for documentation. I hope the active developers of RawTherapee will think about this. There are people who can help (even those like me who can read/write only one language) but the existing team needs to decide how others (who are not coders or color scientists) can participate. Thank you for raising these issues.
Those concerns are being discussed here: Documentation improvement - RawPedia replacement · Issue #6999 · RawTherapee/RawTherapee · GitHub