Quality assurance on the help wiki

[Craig Box]

19:21 < mdke> so, more replies to the "quality assurance on the wiki" and
              "categories on the wiki" threads please

I maintain a reasonably popular wiki, started by our LUG.  I've found
lots of pages get tagged with our "CategoryCleanup" tag, and
realistically, either one of the (two-odd) wiki gnomes looks at it, and
fixes it up, or it stays in there.

The Ubuntu wiki has the potential to have a lot more people, but even at
a page each a day, which is a reasonably big ask for large pages that
aren't in your area of expertise - to clean up a page I often have to
learn about the topic.

Perhaps there could be a system for categorizing -why- something is in
CategoryCleanup - I got the impression that every page of documentation
in the old wiki was in the category, which effectively makes it "needs
DocTeam review", which is fair enough.  This is what you asked for in
your original email.


Something else that isn't taken in to account, or as far as I can tell,
addressed, is "version relevance".  This ranges from HowToDoXOnHoary
(say Breezy does it natively), to "this is how you do X on Breezy, file
locations have changed on Dapper etc".

Keeping old documentation for maintained versions is worthwhile -
equally important is making sure that documentation is updated for each
new release, especially LTS releases.  For example, I'm looking for a
spare afternoon to tidy up
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomizationHowTo, which is
an area I have a large amount of experience in, but the page is
currently Breezy-centric, as d-i preseed options have changed in
Dapper.  That page should have been tagged in some way to point out that
it needs bringing up to date, and after release, there can be a lot of
docteam work there.

(By the way, should all of the pages moved to h.u.c have had a redirect
created automatically?)


I'd love to see, and will happily take part in, a concerted effort to
get all 300 pages to a standard to take out of CategoryCleanup (two a
day, 30 people, 5 days?)  After that, people who are interested in
looking after the wiki can start doing fun things, like scouring forums
for things to put online.  Come Edgy, the docteam can go over the wiki,
looking for pages to be marked "needs updating, method changed".

Perhaps the onus could be put on the regular visitor to mark pages as
being out of date?  To be truely useful, I feel it has to be in a
fashion that you don't have to learn about adding categories to do so -
more along the lines of having to click a button that says "The info on
this page didn't work for me".

Craig


Craig