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

[Connor Imes]

Hi all,

On 06/05/2011 08:50 PM, Jorge O. Castro 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 out of date our documentation is, and have been asking people to go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:
Nice screenshot of RecentChanges :)
>> 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.
I've been working as staff on the forums and as a wiki editor/admin for
a number of years now, and I find myself disagreeing with this point. 
While there are some guides on the forums that may be useful, at least
partially, on wiki pages, most forums guides end up being very specific
in their intent.  Many are targeted at a particular set of hardware or a
more complex task than simply getting something working.  These types of
guides are also more difficult to maintain across multiple releases and
in the cases that they have been moved to the wiki, they usually go
unmaintained and quickly become deprecated.  I expect this is because of
their complexity or are just too specific for many people to care about
or even have the knowledge to accurately maintain.

I have found that the best-maintained wiki pages cover a broad topic or
set of hardware such that the material is applicable to many users, esp.
to beginners.
>> 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.
Again a -1 from me.  Just have a look at some of the topics for guides
[1].  As I said above, many are quite specific and can be rather
complex.  A good chunk of these require more than a beginners knowledge
base to use effectively (or safely for that matter).

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=100
>> 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.
>
It might help to integrate the wiki(s), system documentation, and
ubuntu.com better.  There are some links on the Support page [2], but
after that the user is on their own to navigate.  A common header
section might be beneficial.

[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/support

Cheers,
-Connor