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

[Jared Norris]

On 6 June 2011 08:44, Manjul Apratim <manjul.apratim at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Do you realise the difference between help.u.c and wiki.u.c? The "wiki" you
are referring to isn't actually meant to be a document of technical support,
it's more for team collaboration than technical support. It's actually
discouraged as a place to store technical information as that is not the
goal of the Ubuntu wiki. If you check out help.u.c you will find both
official documentation (eg 2 clicks to determine version and release from
help.u.c is https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-help/index.html) as well as
a community maintained wiki of information (this time only 1 click from
help.u.c is an introduction page of https://help.ubuntu.com/community).


> 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".
>
>
A wiki does not have to only ever hold technical information about a
product, I don't understand this assumption. Wikis can, and are, used by
different groups for different things.


> 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.
>
>
The community contributed documentation is only as good as the community
contributing it. How many howtos that you've seen on the forums have you
transferred to the wiki? How many have you referred to the docs team to
transfer?


> 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
>

The only change I can see making a difference is somehow making it clear the
difference between wiki.u.c and help.u.c but people already strive to do
this so I'm not sure what can be done to improve this? Short of writing a
disclaimer in the footer or header of all pages (where the licensing
information is?) the only change I can see needing is more people to
contribute to the community documentation.

The only other change I can think of would be to do some search engine
optimisation so that people looking for information can find it on the
help.u.c or wiki.u.c easier, depending on what information they're looking
for.


Regards,

Jared Norris
(aka head_victim)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JaredNorris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20110606/d7696d84/attachment.html>