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

Manjul Apratim manjul.apratim at gmail.com
Mon Jun 6 05:08:46 UTC 2011


I do not disagree with a single one of these points; however, I beseech for
a change of perspective:

I do understand that the purpose of the wiki, as it stands is collaborative
rather than technical, and I also concede that there is no specific usage
that the word "wiki" entails. In fact, it is not the term that is the issue
- "help.ubuntu.com" serves the purpose just as well as "wiki.ubuntu.com"
would have in that place - the issue is fragmentation of the existing
technical documentation and its obscurity within the depths of the Ubuntu
homepage. At the very least, "official Ubuntu documentation" should most
certainly be merged with "community contributed documentation", with the
official documentation serving as some sort of install guide/introduction to
the complete documentation rather than existing as a separate unit - this
makes for 2 clicks to the relevant place, and ONE relevant place, rather
than tributarizing a newbie's quest into too many channels - at the moment,
one may go to the official documentation, or to the community documentation,
or to Launchpad, or to IRC... too many choices for someone who wants the
answer. What do you see kids do when they don't want to research an answer
to a homework question? They ask somebody who already knows. Well, that is
why these newbie's land up in the forum without having done a shred of
research regarding their problem.

I have in the past tried to edit pages on the wiki, but to me at least, it
seems that information creeps into an abyss where no one would ever look -
take for instance Grub2 documentation or Broadcom Wifi documentation, which
I edited to remove certain information that was outdated and replace it with
current (at least as of then), and yet people ask the same questions on the
forums, and I keep on pointing them to these pages.

In fact I am not even talking about how many click it takes - it is not the
fact or page rank afforded by a search engine that I am concerned about, but
rather the idea - or, if you prefer, the planting of that idea in the brains
which stumble upon Ubuntu, that they inevitably will see the right answer
they need in the documentation pages before they need to ask a question on
the forums. Documentation exists, and no one denies it; is it
newbie-easy-to-find is the question. After all, the installer was improved
to the way it is to make it fool-proof against those very same newbies.



On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Jared Norris <jrnorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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).
>
> 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.
> 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?
>
> 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
>



-- 
Manjul Apratim
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