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

[Manjul Apratim]

I agree 100% with the Tutorials and Tips idea - I am myself going to strive
to push all of that into the wiki, and I am going to urge forum members to
do so themselves, so that the section may be shut down from the forums.

Regarding searching for the problem in Google, I beg to differ in one major
aspect, and that is the aspect of human nature - if you are lost you would
first and foremost try to find the way home, and not try to look for
alternative means of support, and this is the same idea I am talking about
capitalizing on. Of course, even with a fragmented documentation, people
will still find the relevant page with a Google search, but they do not know
then that this is the *definitive* place to go to. In fact, if one knows
that one may find the answer in "help.ubuntu.com", one will look for "
help.ubuntu.com", first rather than search for say, "Ubuntu Broadcom 4312
not connecting" in Google, because the latter creates uncertainty, at least
in the mind of the naive n00b.

A new wiki is not so much called for as is the merging of different channels
of help available with regard to the documentation. On a broad abstraction,
a distinction between the "Ubuntu wiki" and the "help pages" needs to be
made more stark, and the "help pages" need to be a single hub of
information, rather than a bifurcated mess to choose from. The wiki of
course, won't be fixed unless the community fixes it itself, but the
community should have incentive to go there to fix it first - the help pages
need to be awarded a more central role than they already are in, which is a
sidekick one to the "official documentation".



On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Jorge O. Castro <jorge at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 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 out of date our documentation is, and have been asking people to go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
>



-- 
Manjul Apratim
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