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

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 6:44 PM, 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

Thanks for bringing this up. I have a talk at UDS about how horribly
out of date our documentation is, and have been asking people to go
back and clean up after themselves.

http://castrojo.tumblr.com/post/5651069099/cleaning-up-after-ourselves

I have some comments about your ideas:

> 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 wiki has lasted as long as the forums have existed and there have
been multiple attempts to get information out of the forums and into
the wiki. Ideally the "Tutorials and Tips" section shouldn't even
exist, as it encourages people to duplicate information, and since
it's a forum, no one except the original poster can fix it, which
means if someone is wrong someone else can't fix it.

> 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".

I'm not convinced this is a problem. Most people will just search for
the problem in Google and go where they end up. Unfortunately for us
Google penalizes slow web sites, which means that many times the
results from the official wiki won't be on the front page of a search.
Fortunately the IS team has been working on this problem and we should
see performance improvements in the following weeks.


> 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.

Our wiki is 7 years old and has 7 years of information to clean up, of
course a newer wiki will be cleaner. I don't understand how we can fix
the "send people to the wiki" problem other than fixing the wiki and
telling people to go to it.

> 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.

Really someone should propose to move all the HOWTOs to the wiki and
shut down the section in the forums.

> 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.

I don't think end users will care about the word "wiki". Making the
information more relevant so the site performs better and shows up
better on search engines seems like the way to fix this for real.


-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://twitter.com/castrojo
Help fix Unity Bitesize Bugs: http://goo.gl/i1WA1