Accessing wiki content from another web app

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
 
I think there is a danger of "yet another" guide to ubuntu which increases 
confusion and may become difficult to keep updated.  However, surely it might be 
possible to use redirects so that when people arrive at the new place they are 
simply automatically redirected to the relevant page within existing 
documentation.  

 
The existing documentation is already read-only to an extent (even the Community 
Documentation).  Only people determined to make a change can get the logins and 
if someone makes a mess or adds spam then other people either revert to earlier 
versions or adapt the revision.  Many times even a 'wrong answer' can help 
people find a new approach that simplifies things for everyone. Note that there 
are overviews of all changes made within an existing wiki such as Community 
Documentation.
 
It sometimes feels wrong when doing paid work to simply use existing stuff that 
has been created by other people but this is exactly what helps us get the whole 
job done.  For example, the Spanish Governments paid translators to translate 
Ubuntu into Spanish and they used existing systems, alongside volunteers, to get 
through the work-load.  As a result Spanish was the first completed translation 
and gets completed first, even before English (Gb), at each new release of 
Ubuntu.  This benefits a significant chunk of the world as a great many 
countries speak Spanish.  So everyone wins, everyone that prefers using Spanish 
at least and possibly the people that find it easier to translate from Spanish 
into some other language.  The governments win because while they only pay a 
certain number of translators they get a much larger result than they directly 
pay for and many have an Ubuntu-based distro carefully modified for their own 
country.  

 
The main thing is to find the easiest and longest lasting way of achieving your 
targets in an acceptable way.  If someone here does have a good idea that you 
find helpful then go with it.  If you find my comment unhelpful or unacceptable 
within you aims then ignore it.  No harm either way.
 
Good luck and many regards from
Tom :)


 



________________________________
From: Ahmed Kamal <ahmed.kamal at canonical.com>
To: ubuntu-doc <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Mon, 2 August, 2010 8:21:43
Subject: Re: Accessing wiki content from another web app

On 07/30/2010 09:01 PM, Mathias Gug wrote:
> Hi Ahmed,
>
> Excerpts from Ahmed Kamal's message of Tue Jul 27 07:17:30 -0400 2010:
>    
>> I have been asked to work on building a consolidated web portal for
>> everything that relates to Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Part of what I want
>> to do is to gather lots of documentation pages from the wiki, and
>> present them in a consolidated manner on that portal. I think it's a
>> good idea to keep the content on the wiki, where it's easy to edit for
>> everyone, while dynamically pulling content from the wiki to construct
>> that consolidated reading material in an eye pleasing manner. The web
>> application will most likely be a Django app. The way I am imagining how
>> to pull this off, is to have the Django app connect to the wiki using
>> its API (xmlrpc or similar) and pull the contents of its pages, which
>> then renders them in a way that blends with the look and feel of the portal.
>>
>>      
> What's the reason to have a read-only copy of the documentation directly
> into the portal?
>
> If the goal is to have the documentation more reader-friendly I'd
> suggest to actually improve the wiki *itself* so that it benefits
> everyone.
>
> It should also be possible to organize the wiki pages as a book. It
> seems that one of the step in importing the documentation into the
> portal is to organize it - why not do that directly in the wiki?
>
> As far as branding is concerned it may possible to brand differently all
> relevant sub pages.
>
> I'd rather see the documentation linked from the portal and indexed
> when searching from the portal.
>
>    Write once, read at one place, linked and indexed from  many places.
>
>    
Hi Mathias,

Thanks for your feedback. I agree that the wiki itself should be 
improved, and the "book style" collection of pages should be made 
available on the wiki itself, I'll try to add that there too. As for why 
this documentation is being presented in a read-only manner over that 
portal. Well, although this decision has been made for me up in the 
chain, the reasons I understand why this is needed, is to provide a 
new-comer with one central location that has all the information he 
would need about the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud product. Asking a 
new-comer, probably from a Windows background to locate the ubuntu wiki 
and click through 50 pages there can be a high barrier for entry. 
However again, for all the Ubuntu geeks out there, I agree the wiki 
should always be the canonical source of information. That's why I'm 
keeping all the info there and only mirroring it somewhere else

Regards

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