Documentation reliability

[Matthew East]

> On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 10:45:19AM +0100, Mario Vukelic wrote:
>> [sorry Matt, the pesky list reply again]
>>
>> On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 20:56 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>> > The official documentation *is* produced by the community.
>>
>> This starts to confuse the hell outta me. Now is it official or isn't
>> it. By "official" I mean, can I trust as a user that the instructions
>> given are reasonable correct? Matthew seems to say "no" [1]
>
> I think that the current scheme is somewhat confusing.  My understanding
> was
> that the official documentation, produced/blessed/maintained by the
> Documentation Team, would be on help.ubuntu.com, while the rest (which can
> be created or modified by anyone) would remain on wiki.ubuntu.com.  It
> seems, though, that the wiki documentation is also available at
> help.ubuntu.com/community.  I think the original scheme, as I understood
> it,
> was clearer.

(Clarification - the wiki documentation is *only* available at
help.ubuntu.com/community. There's no point rehearsing the reasons behind
this, they are well documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BetterWikiDocs)

The real question here is how to portray which documentation is reliable,
and which is less reliable. There is a serious misuse of the word
"official" which is giving rise to this confusion right now. Both the
"official" documents and "non-official" wiki documents are contributed to
by community volunteers, rather than professionals (there is *no*
documentation right now that Canonical rubber-stamps). The simple fact is
that the "official" documentation isn't in fact necessarily more reliable
than some of the more carefully attended wiki pages. On the other hand,
there are other wiki pages that are not necessarily very reliable, and
others that are downright unreliable.

The challenge here is to create a system which makes what the users get to
see represent this reality. The answer isn't to make users look on two
different websites for a non-existent division between official and
non-official documentation, but rather to establish a system where users
can access all material in the same website (which of course has immense
benefits in terms of searching and navigability), but to establish a good
quality assurance system which (a) is easy for community members to
contribute to and add their experience, and (b) communicates well to the
user exactly how reliable a page is.

If you've got some ideas about this for online documentation, please check
out this spec: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpWikiQualityAssurance (we could
probably use some coding help with it too).

Take any replies to this to the ubuntu-doc mailing list please!

Matt