Bug: There is no Ubuntu "wiki" (storehouse of information) easily accessible to new users

[Manjul Apratim]

I realize that by spurring this discussion I am opening a can of worms that
has long existed and been reiterated upon continuously, but I also feel that
urgent action is needed, since this is the point that Ubuntu has indeed been
established as a *tour-de-force* to be reckoned with. I opened a
corresponding bug on Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/792979

People on the forums have complained time and time again about the state of
the Ubuntu wiki, and by the "wiki", I mean the community-contributed
technical documentation - as `Thewhistlingwind' said, it is 'hard to
navigate' and lies 'in a backwater of the community'. Notwithstanding is the
problem that there is a wealth of information in the forum archives that is
just sitting there inaccessible to most new users without extensive
searching, and which urgently needs to become part of the wiki. The very
fact that the documentation is not centralized nor easily accessible makes
potential contributors refrain from contributing to it. The bigger problem
with this is that it creates unnecessary forum traffic - new users stumbling
upon a problem and unable to find a useful solution come tumbling down to
the forums and ask questions that have been asked over and over again, as
well as that could be solved by the simple availability of a few lines worth
of tweaks.

The current "Ubuntu wiki" is actually official documentation regarding the
hierarchy and organization of the Ubuntu machinery, and while indeed it may
be called a "wiki" of sorts, it is not a wiki in the truest sense in that it
is not a community edited hub of technical information that new users may
turn to to solve their problems. Instead, the path that leads to the actual
"wiki" - the community edited documentation, is obscure and of course, a
simple Google search for "Ubuntu wiki" on the web leads to no useful
technical documentation directly. In fact, a user may be thrown off by the
fact that the pages ask him to refer to the "official documentation" as well
as the "community contributed documentation".

Take the example of Arch Linux. It has probably the most excellent Wiki one
could ask for; there's Arch, and there's the ArchWiki. New users installing
Arch are referred to the Wiki - and most of the qualms a new user may have
may be solved directly by reading the wiki - there's no five different
places a user has to refer to to find what information is relevant and what
is out of date. Any useful information arrived at in the forums is made
immediately available on the Wiki. I do agree that Arch and Ubuntu are
potentially targeted at different user bases, but while Arch is intended to
be an "advanced distro", the presence of the Wiki makes it accessible even
to new users. In contrast, there are some veterans on the Ubuntu forums
which have posted several great HOWTO's there, but these really belong in a
central place on the Wiki, along with other good documentation that pops up
from time to time.

I would like to propose the following *two modest changes*, to begin with:

1> The "Ubuntu Team Wiki" may be made part of something like the "About"
pages on the main website, directly linked to from the homepage, thereby
preserving its integrity.
2> The "Community Contributed Documentation" may be renamed as the "Ubuntu
Wiki", and linked to directly from the homepage - preferably somewhere near
the top right corner.

If these two changes are made, the "Wiki" shall already be a big leap into
trying to fix itself - more and more Ubuntu veterans would come and
contribute to it, making it the "go-to" place for referring to technical
documentation on Ubuntu. The problem of dead links id hardly an issue - once
the documentation is easily out there to be edited, this problem shall
vanish in no time.

-- 
Manjul Apratim
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