Links in wiki

Jordan Mantha laserjock at ubuntu.com
Wed Jul 22 17:16:58 BST 2009


On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 6:22 AM, Ace Suares<ace at suares.an> wrote:
<snip>
> Unfortunately the edubuntu.org page takes ages to load from my location,
> or will not load at all. Is there some problem with the site? Other
> sites load quickly.

There's no problem with the site that I'm aware of. I don't think
anybody else has reported a problem with it so maybe there is some
local issue, though I don't know what would make other pages load fine
in that case.

> I think it would be very good to add a link to the LTSP pages, which I
> can never find in wiki.ubuntu.com.

That's because wiki.ubuntu.com is a development team wiki. It's not
meant to house user documentation. More on that below.

> I tried to search the wiki for 'ltsp' but I get a lot of pages but not
> the 'main' entry page for all things related to LTSP. See
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Home?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=ltsp&titlesearch=Titles
>
>
> I also tried to search google for 'ubuntu ltsp'. The first hit is
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThinClientHowto, which when opened,
> leads to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP. But from that
> page I can't find https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinClientHowtoNAT. I am
> utterly confused.

Right, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP is the entry to
LTSP wiki documentation in Ubuntu/Edubuntu. I'm not sure what happened
to the material from ThinClientHowtoNAT but hopefully somebody else
will know.

> Every time when I mention my utter confusion about how to find certain
> information, the answers from the very nice people that make all this
> possible, devs and team members and so on, comprise of the following:
> - do it yourself
> - join a mailing list
> - you did something wrong and that's why you couldn't find it and it's
> your fault
> - and so on.

Open source software is very hands on and do-it-yourself (in a good
way) but can lead to frustrations for users you don't have the time or
knowledge to fix their own problems. In this case the wikis, the
Edubuntu/LTSP parts of both wiki.ubuntu.com and
help.ubuntu.com/community are in need of updating and cleaning up. We
know that things need to improve there but there aren't a lot of
resources (people who have stepped up to contribute back to Edubuntu).
Because we are all volunteers and a pretty small community, resources
get spread thin and so much of the time people will try to help you
fix problems yourself as they don't have time to do it for you. I know
it's tough to get such answers, but most of the time people are just
trying to help you.

> What started as a 5 minute addition to my own website
> (http://www.suares.an/index.php?page_id=1&news_id=253#news-top) became a
> more then two hours lasting foray into how to get this information into
> the community documentation. And it's still not working.

Yes, that is a frustrating and all to common of a problem. I think the
best we can do is to work collaboratively, work respectfully, and work
consistently to get the documentation pulled together into one place
that is well maintained. Documentation is scattered about a bit and
sometime outdated. In trying to clean up sometimes we've created some
"cruft" that needs to be dealt with.

> A guy named Gavin helped me out tremendously. But after my last series
> of 'newbie' questions, he referred me to this list. I subscribed to the
> list, although I know I don't want to read all that is coming from this
> list because my only goal was to quickly post some information, and not
> getting involved in the entire edubuntu-users community. LTSP is not my
> daily work, but sometimes I work with it and when I discover something
> that might be helpful, I just want to relay that information quickly and
> move on.

This list is generally fairly low-traffic but I feel pretty useful for
people using LTSP in Ubuntu/Edubuntu so I hope you stay. :-)

> Thus far I had to go on IRC, mail someone via launchpad, send some
> personal mails, log in to the wiki, learn to use the wiki (not very
> simple), and subscribe to the mailing list to ask some questions about
> the wiki.

Yes, in some ways having so many communication channels can be a
problem in that people don't always know what is the best to use for
their situation.

> One of the devs asked: why don't you post it to the LTSP portal instead
> of putting it on your own page where no one will see it?
>
> Well, I already knew that answer, but I tried it again just to see if
> anything had changed. The answer is:
> - it takes too much time to do so
> - I can't find the LTSP Portal you are talking about;
> - there are to0 many ostacles in doing so;
> - I'd have to learn somethings that I won't use for a long time and then
> I'd have to relearn it next time I want to contribute.

Do you have any suggestions for how things could be made better? What
specific obstacles did you have?

> All that said, I have the following questions about the page I created
> in the wiki, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinClientProxyRedirect
>
> Why does the links in the wiki not work?
> I tought I could just mention ThinClientHowtoNAT and then it would link
> automatically.

They should.

> And why is the page that Gavin made
> (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinClientHowtoNAT) in CategoryCleanup? Mine is
> too becuase I used his page as an example.

The problem is that wiki.ubuntu.com is not for user documentation, but
rather development team coordination, etc. help.ubuntu.com/community/
is the user documentation wiki. I know it's a bit confusing because
you found other LTSP pages on wiki.ubuntu.com, but the CategoryCleanup
indicates that those pages are flagged for being moved to the user
documentation wiki or removed.

> And do you think it is a good idea to make a template for things
> concerning thinclient? Or which general template can I copy that give me
> a basic structure for making such a page? The templates offered when
> creating a new page are many and from none of them it's clear what they
> do or how they look.

I don't know that a thin client template would be very useful in this
case. "Thin Client" is pretty generic so I don't know what such a
template would have.

> PS for the ones that will reply to this message with 'do it yourself' or
> 'file a bug': I am willing to put the energy into it to completely
> reorganize the information about LTSP and make it findable, but I can
> never do that alone so there would need to be a team of preferably 3
> people to do this chore together. But I don't know anyone here.

Agreed, it needs to be a community effort. I really really hope to see
something happening in the near future regarding documentation. It
just seems like we can't get everybody together to hammer out what
exactly needs to be done and start some momentum in getting things
done. Individual efforts over the years have been awesome, but we need
to pull together a cohesive documentation team that is sustainable for
the long term.

> PPSS for those that refer parts of this mail to yet another mailing
> list: nope. This is my last effort at trying to get at grips with this
> community documentation. And it's definately not my first. Maybe this is
> just not for me, and I am willing to take all the blame for not
> understanding the concepts correctly and being dumb and all that.

I don't think you're dumb. Contributing to an operating system and
technical documentation is not easy. It takes time and patience but is
often quite rewarding in the end.

-Jordan



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