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

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2013-12-01 16:44, Svetlana Belkin wrote:
> It might just be me and not understanding why we have redundancy or
> even not having a Community Wiki.  I just feel like it *IS NOT* like
> the genetic code where you can have redundancy and it's useful.

Whatever we think of it, users' efforts to help result in a lot of
redundancy. Users help other users by answering questions in Ask Ubuntu
and other forums. Some make use of blogs, and a few contribute to the
Community Wiki. This is not a problem per se. On the contrary, it's the
heart and soul of an OS with a lot of community involvement.

It's true that there is a lot of outdated and/or bad advice out there,
but there isn't much we as a team can do about it. We don't control the
Internet.

To me, the Community Wiki is merely one of all the resources where you
can look for answers. It's special in the sense that the ubuntu.com
domain name implicitly indicates higher quality. So it's good if we
monitor and tag it, as several have mentioned in this thread, and that's
especially important for those pages to which we link from the official
docs. But would it make sense to close the Community Wiki, or some of
the pages, just for the sake of it? No, it would not.

The most important thing we as a team can do for the users is to make
*the official docs* as correct and relevant as possible. The higher
relevance, the more often you'll see people linking to it from various
forums and blogs.

-- 
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj