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

Sat Jun 11 03:29:43 UTC 2011

Okay... as asked on the editing options for the homepage to the Community
Documentation, I shall first be making changes to the Draft. Then I will
show up and ask again for opinions regarding the changes I made.

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Manjul Apratim
<manjul.apratim at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree with most arguments presented here, and I would not wish to have
> any of the relevant forum sections removed or have the documentation be
> created from scratch.
>
> I would like to, however, chart out a concrete plan of attack to make the
> Ubuntu knowledge base immaculate, at least as much as Arch's.
>
> My proposals:
>
> 1) I would like to see the frontpage "help.ubuntu.com" merged with the
> frontpage "https://help.ubuntu.com/community". Before I receive raised
> eyebrows for this, pray let me elucidate: The "help.ubuntu.com" part is a
> tiny page anyway, and it could be made an opening section of the resulting
> page, with the title "Official Installation Guide". The pages linking from
> it for each release starting from Dapper could still be left immutable.
>
> 2) I will start from "ground up" - basically, over the next couple of weeks
> or so (I would like to start right NOW but I am extremely busy; I shall have
> to do this when I am taking a break or so), I shall try to make extensive
> changes to the opening page of the community documentation. This is because
> putting myself in the shoes of a newbie, I do not really like how the page
> is organized nor much of what is on the page (compare this with how the new
> Ubuntu installer greets you). I will make the changes as I feel are
> appropriate, and then paste an appropriate "changelog" here, asking people
> for feedback. The best thing about this is that since this is the best form
> of "peer-review", it can only get better. I will proceed to the linking
> pages in due course.
>
> 3) Some of the pages that link from the first page, for instance:
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CategoryCategory
>
> look like simply, for the lack of a better word, YUCK! Even if the pages
> linking from that page are to remain named "CategoryXXX", there is no reason
> the word category should appear in the text corresponding to each link,
> making it appear a million times on that page. I would like to remove the
> word "Category" from all those links.
>
> I will post later as I think of more ideas.
>
> Manjul
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Connor Imes <rocket2dmn at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Manjul Apratim
>

-- 
Manjul Apratim
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