more of an observation about the wiki and less of a rant

[Paul O'Malley]

Hello,

With regard to the wiki when we consider that this site has grown from a 
small effort to who knows how many pages in the short time it has been 
up. Whilst we may have the easiest to install and use distro on planet 
earth is it the case that "the web site" not "our web site" is in need 
of a lot of Ubuntu love to make it "our web site"?

For example:
We still have references to the 2004 google bounties on the foot of the 
community page.
We still have copyright 2005 at the foot of all the web pages.
https://www-master.ubuntu.com/UserPreferences
Error 401 - I has wanted to work on it but hey it has been locked down 
by someone, I am not being critical of  this, just have no idea who 
should be contacted.

So at the moment we have parts of a community who are working on part of 
the various projects that need to be done. However for each grouping 
they are focused as if their part was most central to their own overall 
situation. The creation of multiple focus points one for each of the 
groups makes sense however it may be that we are missing a huge 
opportunity by not having a "hard" connection to and from the various 
groups.

What seems to be missing is inter group communication. This idea is not 
new. What I am wondering is this, how do we go from the current position 
where various groups does not know what the other groups are doing. The 
only way at the moment without being involved in all the groups is to 
stumble across it.

For example, there is currently a need for a web page that discusses 
boot options I can put my hands up on this one. It could be put in 
malone as a feature request, though it is hardly appropriate. There is a 
fantastic amount of work being done on the wiki.
However have a look at the work done here 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecentChanges and you will get an idea of the 
scale of what is going on for the last few days. If however there is a 
feeling that topic X needs to be on the wiki there does not seem to be a 
way of requesting this.

I am loath to suggest a way out from here as it is only one version of 
what could be done, but there are more than likely more ideas out there, 
and I would imagine better ones at that, so as a starting point is there 
use for a single page with the current objectives and WIP of all 
projects like an rss accumulator from the individual sites to a page 
that feeds back to a page for each of the projects. This way all 
projects are tied to all other projects. Does anyone see value in this?

If this work gets done is there any chance that a better search of the 
site takes place, as far as I can see the only searching that takes 
place at this time is in the topics of a wiki page. Then we end up with 
situations like the one I found myself in yesterday, I wrote a page for 
the wiki that deals with a very specific circumstance, and the only way 
I know to get out of that situation, but given the way I wrote it I 
called it what it is a kludge. Now this data is not searchable as 
resolution of certain vague hot plug issues during an install, which it 
could be called, so it is not really findable, but from an irc 
perspective it works. I must have talked 10 or 15 people through this in 
irc in the last month. (Can you guess where my focus is? :-))

To sum up this suggestion is a summary page that all groups find on 
their part of the wiki and a better search tool for the site.

Regards,

Paul O'Malley