Current wiki access status

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 10:35 AM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I can't help thinking of a consequence of this, which hasn't been
> mentioned yet. The community help wiki is huge, and one well known
> problem is that it contains a lot of outdated information.

Indeed. The admin team that I'm part of for the community help wiki
has generally had a policy of not dictating or influencing the fact
that it's so out of date by actually updating it a priority. We
encourage people to contribute to the official docs to make sure at
least those are kept updated, because we always struggle with even
that small subset of documentation.

Instead we support the tagging system[0] to attempt to inform readers
and contributors about the status of pages, but it's not universally
used and there have only been a few efforts over the years to go
through pages and apply tagging. Going through the wiki pages is also
a task that should be done on a regular schedule (say, annually? every
six months as part of the release cycle?). A contributor to organize
and promote this would would go a long way to making the wiki more
valuable, or at least not actively risky for folks using outdated
instructions.

[0] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Tag

> Sometimes we get requests for changes - via bug reports or mailing lists
> - to help wiki pages. Personally I have more often than not and up to
> now replied to such requests with: "It's a wiki. If you know how it can
> be improved, please go ahead and do it." How should we respond to such
> requests going forward?

I agree with your request to clearly document how to join the list of
users who can edit the wiki. In the case of a bug report, I think you
can instead say something like:

"It's a wiki with a restricted editing group that you may join. So if
you know how it can be improved, please contact the group admins
referencing this bug number and how you plan on improving this page
and they will review your request to add you to the team."

> A wiki is a wiki is a wiki. As opposed to peer reviewed official
> documentation. But the community help wiki is not truly a wiki any
> longer, is it? And if not, what is it?

I'd love to hear from the folks who are still actively contributing to
the community help wiki, but based on edits I've seen over time the
community help wiki is used because:

- It's easy, until this year all you needed was a launchpad account, a
web browser and some knowledge, basic syntax is easy to pick up.

- It doesn't require any local tooling or building. You could edit it
on your phone or on your desktop, no need to install development tools
locally and build documentation and learn a complicated syntax. We
provide instructions for this, but contributing to the official docs
still is not easy.

 - Documentation could be shared that's outside the scope and
commitment of the broader documentation team without needing
permission from anyone, but not just posted on some random blog (which
may have outages, etc)

I think even as a more restricted tool membership wise, the wiki is
still valuable for the other things.

> What comes to mind is that it's suddenly even more important than
> previously to launch a plan for dropping outdated/unmaintained contents
> from the community help wiki. I'm assuming that it would be unrealistic
> that a small team of volunteers would have the time and knowledge
> necessary to keep help wiki pages, which were long ago abandoned by
> their creators, up to date.

I believe in the tagging system. I think it's OK to keep old
documentation around until someone comes along to update it as long as
we mark it as such.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2