A Though on Redundancy of Community Wiki and Other Forms of Support

[cprofitt]

On Sun, 2013-12-01 at 10:44 -0500, Svetlana Belkin wrote:
> All,
> 
> Just a thought on the Community Wiki, one that I will say no offence to,
> if this will hurt someone's feelings.  Why is there major redundancy
> with the various formats of documentation/support that we have?  This
> includes AskUbuntu and the forums.  Well, mainly with AskUbuntu.  It
> seems that most users who need support will go to AskUbuntu without
> first looking in the Community Wiki, at least what I see when I pop in
> and out of AskUbuntu.

I think this is a really good question and one that does need to be
answered. Let me start with what I feel are the strengths of each
platform.

      * AskUbuntu - allows for multiple answers and up-voting allows for
        good answers to be viewed 'higher' than other answers.
      * Forums - allows for a dialog to take place between the person
        seeking help and those giving help. Often a person asking for
        help does not know what technical details to give so that others
        may help them. Initial questions are vague and need
        clarification. The forums are also better for asking 'opinion
        questions' like - what is the best content management system
        that can run on Ubuntu 14.04
      * Wiki - This is an excellent medium to use for guides on how to
        setup a particular software. This is especially true for
        software that is not pre-packaged in the repositories.

> I understand why we still have the Community Wiki (or I don't), but in
> it's current state, it's not effective.  Or it's because AskUbuntu was
> added later on for the ease of support.

AskUbuntu was added later on. The Community Wiki, in my opinion, should
be used to document things like the following:

      * https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Joomla
      * https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide

The problem with the Joomla documentation is that it is badly out of
date having been written for 6.06 and 7.04. Though it was tested again
under 10.04. 

As a to-do, I will try to update that page based on my blog post.

http://ftbeowulf.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/joomla-on-ubuntu-server-13-10/

In my opinion documents like this are not ideal:

      * https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Moodle

This is due to the fact is simple points to another external source and
there is/was no need for a unique page. One page listing all the
external instructions could have been compiled and used. I do realize
that this might be a personal preference though.


> It's either we need to figure out what what users want from the Ubuntu
> Community Wiki via a survey or we, as a team, could work activity and
> clean it up so it's easier to use.  Or another solution can be also
> worked out, maybe something on the AskUbuntu site about the Community Wiki.

AskUbuntu, in my opinion, is not the best place for a detailed guide to
installing Joomla or configuring Samba. It is fantastic for asking
questions such as why 'passwordless ssh can not accept the key' -
http://askubuntu.com/questions/378342/passwordless-ssh-cannot-accept-the-key

I am sure that since AskUbuntu came later that there is cross over. I
also agree that there is likely confusion amongst end users as to what
resources to use to get the information they need. In a perfect world...

A guide on installing Joomla would be created on the
help.ubuntu.com/community wiki and it would link to AskUbuntu using a
search term as follows: http://askubuntu.com/search?q=joomla


Thanks for raising the point. I think it is one we have to work through.

Charles