The future of Community Help Wiki

[Serge Hallyn]

Quoting Peter Matulis (peter.matulis at canonical.com):
> 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.

There's an alternative.  It doesn't take a lot of time for a human to
vet whether proposed changes are spam or not.  If proposed changes
were sent in email I'm sure we could find some volunteers (I'd be
one) to spend a bit of time each day clicking yes/no (or better yet,
replying email yes/no).  Someone however would have to set up that
infrastructure.

If we went this route, it would also leave room for an interesting
experiment - a few community members interested in AI could, while
this vetting was going on, train and verify something to automate
the vetting.  I'd think an RNN in serial with bayes would be
effective.

-serge