The future of Community Help Wiki

Wed Jan 6 15:41:27 UTC 2016

Hi Pasi, thanks for broaching the subject. It is indeed an opportune time
to review the purpose of the Ubuntu help wiki and how we may go forward.

A lot of effort was made to this wiki, making it appear to be actual Ubuntu
documentation, provided by the community. Some "official-looking" pages
(such as ISO hashes and, like you mentioned, package information), in turn,
spurred more suchlike pages. It was a noble effort and the builders and
designers of it should be commended for their vision. However, it has
turned out to be primarily a massive collection of unmaintained user notes.

> 1) When there is a better place for some information found in the wiki,
it should be permanently moved there

Yes, I agree. The only place I can think of is the official documentation.

> 2) Add meaningful structure for the pages with important and useful
information

IMO, we should not bother trying to prop up the wiki anymore.

> 3) Remove pages with information that has little or no use at all, or
which duplicate content found elsewhere

Regularly pruning the wiki is an idea worth pursuing. Leaving a warning
("Update this page or it will be deleted.") beforehand makes sense and
maybe also send a list of deletion candidates to the ubuntu-doc mailing
list.

I asked myself how Wikipedia is able to be so successful. It seems we
should be able to learn from the project. Here are some starter links:

https://goo.gl/UgIOYB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism_on_Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ten_things_you_may_not_know_about_Wikipedia

Peter

On 6 January 2016 at 06:11, Pasi Lallinaho <pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>

-- 
Peter Matulis
Canonical Ltd.
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