Bug: There is no Ubuntu "wiki" (storehouse of information) easily accessible to new users
Tom Davies
tomdavies04 at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Jun 6 03:18:19 UTC 2011
Hi :)
Old stuff often keeps on working. Sometimes coding needs minor and obvious
changes. Deleting obscure wisdom that has been built up over the years seems
very short-sighted.
Regards from
Tom :)
----- Original Message ----
> From: Jorge O. Castro <jorge at ubuntu.com>
> To: Manjul Apratim <manjul.apratim at gmail.com>
> Cc: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> Sent: Mon, 6 June, 2011 1:50:10
> Subject: Re: Bug: There is no Ubuntu "wiki" (storehouse of information) easily
>accessible to new users
>
> 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 out of date our documentation is, and have been asking people to go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
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
More information about the ubuntu-doc
mailing list