The future of Community Help Wiki

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 2016-01-06 02:02, Elizabeth K. Joseph wrote:
> Given all of our problems generally with this help wiki and logins
> since the switch to Ubuntu SSO, the overall future of this wiki may be
> worth a discussion.

The wiki is, want to acknowledge it or not, a big mess, and since we've 
been proposed to limit the edits to a certain group (and forced to do 
that for a short while anyway), I think this would be a great time to 
take some action with it, not just continue like nothing happened.


I know there are some very high traffic pages. Getting the traffic stats 
for the wiki (RT: #23534 [1]) would help us exactly pinpoint the pages 
that are most used recently and on the other hand, figure out which 
pages aren't used much. If those pages are also tagged [2] (especially 
if they only cover EOL releases), maybe we should take a moment to think 
if they could be purged.

Furthermore, I know many pages are frequently pointed to, for example 
from ubottu [3]. Whatever happens to the wiki, we should make sure the 
pages that are heavily linked to from our own infrastructure and 
websites are served in the future as well - and if possible, as accurate 
as possible.


On the flip side, I know there are many pages that are more or less 
useless. For example, I would argue that lists of applications that tell 
the user which applications are found in the repository are both hard to 
maintain (because they get old quick) and not adding very much value 
over the package search online [4] or within all package managers.

In the same spirit, pages that introduce specific applications (that are 
often linked to only from the mentioned application lists) that have no 
extra value over the the package descriptions in the repository seem to 
be more or less a waste of time. As an opposite to these pages, there 
are likely a few dozen pages that provide insightful information on how 
to use and configure those packages, and those should be given more 
attention than they are currently.


Unfortunately, the wiki lacks any structure, most painfully indicated by 
the lack of a home page that would be a useful index for anybody wishing 
to find all the great information found in the wiki. The lack of 
structure and the massive amount of data also makes it very hard to 
maintain (as we've seen) and improve. This is especially true if we want 
to make sure the current non-structure structure is kept intact (eg. no 
deleting or renaming pages without redirections).

 From my point of view, the following would make the most sense:
1) When there is a better place for some information found in the wiki, 
it should be permanently moved there
2) Add meaningful structure for the pages with important and useful 
information
3) Remove pages with information that has little or no use at all, or 
which duplicate content found elsewhere

Technically, there are a few ways to achieve this, but let's not get to 
that discussion before we all agree what the right direction is. All 
feedback is welcome.

Cheers,
Pasi


[1] https://rt.ubuntu.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=23534
[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Tag
[3] http://ubottu.com/factoids.cgi?search=help.ubuntu.com%2Fcommunity
[4] http://packages.ubuntu.com/

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project             » http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member, Xubuntu Website Lead   » http://xubuntu.org/