Replace wiki.ubuntu.com with help.ubuntu.com/commmunity

[Matthew East]

Hi,

Sorry, my previous email was sent prematurely, I pressed the wrong
button. I'll carry on.

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 9:51 PM, Marc K. <mk at technomensch.net> wrote:
> This would leave us with:
>
> a) help.ubuntu.com- The Official Help Documents
> b) wiki.ubuntu.com- Community Help Wiki
> - Would the central location for WikiGuide, PageCreation, Formatting,
> etc....
> c) teams.ubuntu.com- The Community Team Wiki
>
> In fact, we can also set up guides.ubuntu.com for the Server and Switching
> guides, etc....

I appreciate that there is a confusion about where the help
documentation is stored, and the distinction between wiki.ubuntu.com
and help.ubuntu.com. The main reason for this is that community
documentation *used* to be on wiki.ubuntu.com too, before it was moved
to help.ubuntu.com/community.

I agree that we should do what we can to resolve this confusion.
However, I'm strongly against your idea of moving help documentation
back to the url wiki.ubuntu.com, and moving the team pages to a new
wiki, for several reasons.

1. There are powerful reasons that a few years back we moved community
documents onto the same site as the official documents. You can see
them described at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BetterWikiDocs. Your idea
doesn't *just* involve changing urls around, it also involves
splitting up our help documents into three different sites, and that's
not a good idea. The whole point of help.ubuntu.com is to have all
documents in the same place.

2. Changing *again* the role of wiki.ubuntu.com would create even more
confusion than there is now. It has taken a couple of years for most
people to get used to the distinction between help.ubuntu.com and
wiki.ubuntu.com, and changing the goal posts again would have a
devastating effect.

3. Essentially the effect of your change would be that people visiting
wiki.ubuntu.com expecting to find their team pages would not find
them, and would find another wiki in its place. That would cause the
huge community of Ubuntu developers a substantial inconvenience.

I do see that there is confusion between wiki.ubuntu.com and
help.ubuntu.com/community that needs to be addressed. We kicked around
some ideas for improving that on this specification:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ImproveWebsiteStructure

It has since been superceded by a number of changes, not least by the
theme change to www.ubuntu.com, but it still has some valid ideas. I
think that the most obvious and achievable idea is to distinguish the
two sites by way of different theming. In particular we can give the
sites a different header, but we could also consider other theme
changes. That specification also suggests a *change* of url for
wiki.ubuntu.com (not a substitution), but I have to say that I think
even that will be difficult to convince the community of: it is just
too attached to wiki.ubuntu.com. The other thing we can do is to
improve the redirects that are in place on wiki.ubuntu.com to
help.ubuntu.com/community for pages which used to be documentation
before the move (example: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats).
There are thousands of these. Part of the problem with these redirects
is that the user won't even notice that they have moved wiki when
redirected. I'd like to implement a more graceful 404 page for such
pages so that the user is informed that the page has been moved to a
different site. Again that is discussed on that specification.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF