Accessing wiki content from another web app

[Mathias Gug]

Hi Ahmed,

Excerpts from Ahmed Kamal's message of Mon Aug 02 03:21:43 -0400 2010:
> On 07/30/2010 09:01 PM, Mathias Gug wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >    
> 
> 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,

I'd say that the objective and the end-user experience has been defined
*up in the chain*. The implementation details are still in the air IMO.

> 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.

Great - this is the result and how the end user experience would feel
like.

> 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. 

Agreed - that doesn't mean whole wiki pages should be copied to the site.
I'd focus more in linking them appropriately.

As you've outlined the documentation would be presented as a book. I
think the book structure could be done in the wiki itself and the top
page be linked from the portal - a documentation link on the portal
would simply link to it. That way new-comer won't have to locate the
ubuntu wiki. It will be discoverable from the portal.

Overall I'd focus on linking to wiki pages and searching wiki pages in
the portal rather than copying pages around.

> 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
> 

I'm not convinced about the *mirroring* - discoverability and search are
more important IMO and faster to implement.

Having a read-only mirror may also hinder people updating wiki pages as
they would only see read-only pages. IOW linking directly to wiki pages
would also help growing the community by making it easier for casual
readers to create and update content.

-- 
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer  http://www.ubuntu.com