Thinking Aloud: Drastic Overhaul of Ubuntu Wiki

[earthpigg]

Stemming from this (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10688906) discussion.

TLDR Version: http://editthis.info/earthpigs_playground/Main_Page

This isn't something worth launching into full-tilt without soliciting a plethora of opinions on why it is a good or horrible idea.

I'm not even sure I like the idea, to be honest. But, here we go.


I'll copy/paste some of my ramblings from that thread here, and then edit them out of that discussion.


why does the ubuntu wiki deviate from established wiki norms by so much?

no 'article of the day/month/whatever', no 'random article', nothing that encourages exploring the information available, no friendly 'edit' button that doesn't require creating yet another login (it isn't integrated with ubuntuforums.org logins, but we are trying to encourage ubuntuforums.org users to help teh migration process?).

i hestitate to say it, but the only real way to navigate around the ubuntu wiki seems to be by putting "ubuntu wiki" in a google search.

blek.


if all i had to do was hit 'random article' or 'most popular articles' and look for copy-editing errors, typos, or obsolete information to update with a friendly 'edit' button after logging in, i'd probably be on it.

ya know what, disregard all of my above criticism of the wiki. we all know it to be a weak area, but this thread isn't the right place for that discussion.

what is the appropriate venue to discuss the wiki, and improvements thereof?

(please don't let it be a bug report form or a 1993-style mailing list...)



Originally Posted by unknownPoster
I know it doesn't matter now, but the Ubuntu Wiki is a failure in comparison to other wikis such as Arch or Gentoo. Perhaps the eventual closing of the archives will lead to the improvement of the Ubuntu Wiki.
I love the Arch wiki, and often go there before google or ubuntuforums.org and certainly before the ubuntu wiki. The Arch wiki is the most valuable part of that distribution, to me.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/
versus
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/

in anticipation of "why don't you just use arch, and go away, then?":

Because I like Ubuntu better. Arch (the distro) has all sorts of things I dislike. It just so happens that Arch's documentation is much better, and I'm generally able to mentally translate directions from "arch-speak" to "ubuntu-speak" on the fly, and to detect when arch documentation will not apply to an ubuntu system.

here's an example experience: go to both of the above wikis. search them both for "ssh". then go to google and search for "site:ubuntuforums.org ssh".

which of the three is more immediately useful, and which looks like it will be more useful in the long run?


Making the Ubuntu Linux distribution "like arch" would be foolish, but making the Ubuntu Wiki "like the arch wiki" would be phenomenal.

Look at this beautiful and inviting image below: Any of the hundreds of thousands of people that have contributed to wikipedia will feel right at home working on improving this. Any of the millions that read wikipedia will also be at home here. Why not ride the coat-tails of the success of wikipedia with the ubuntu wiki, the way the ubuntu distribution rides the coat-tails of the success of debian?

don't re-invent the wheel without a good reason!



TLDR Version Part 2:


how hard would it be to simply redo the ubuntu wiki as an unofficial thing?

-grab the whole arch wiki.

-re-post it as an unofficial pre-alpha-quality alternative ubuntu wiki.

-put a 'this hasn't been translated yet, and shouldn't be referenced by non-technical users' banner on every article.

-solicit volunteers to systematically begin going through and translate from arch-speak into ubuntu-speak, nixing entire articles that simply do not apply, changing package names where needed, et cetera. this being the operative guidance. once that has been done to any given article, and a few folks have vetted/verified this, the above banner goes away.

-import articles from the ubuntu wiki and ubuntuforums.org as appropriate.

-in a nutshell, fork the arch wiki so it may end up being as useful to ubuntu users that have never used Arch.


Attached is original screenshot from the third self-quote above.

[wojox]

I voted wrong. I think more effort needs to go into the wiki we have now. The Beginners Team is a great place to start. You can join and become a member of the Wiki Focus Group.

[zer010]

From the looks of the sample 'SSH Wiki', I like the idea. I've never been a fan of the look and navigation feel of the Ubuntu Wiki. While some might say that recreating it would be more work, I think it'd be about the same amount of work in trying to get the Ubuntu wiki to be more useful.
Good job! ^.^d

[aG93IGRvIGkgdWJ1bnR1Pw==]

This definitely needs to be done. Right now the users' best bet on getting free help with ubuntu is to google through the forums and try to apply a post from 2007 to a 2011 distro, spam the irc channel or bump their thread until someone deigns to tell them how to properly post a support request. A proper wiki that's thoroughly referenced in the official documentation would go a long way to alleviate those constrains.

(Also a big fan of the Arch wiki here)

[koenn]

@OP
two questions (for starters :) )

1- why do you think you'll get more people to contribute to a 'fork&translate the arch wiki' effort than to a "rewrite ubuntu wiki" effort ? And since documentation needs maintenance : what makes you think the new improved ubuntu wiki won't end up in the same sorry state 12 months after the overhaul ?

2- are you pretty sure the arch wiki people are OK with such a fork, or is this going to be more fuel on the fire of "ubuntu : always leeching, never contributing)


free bonus:

3- Ever seen this : http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Maverick ?

[Dupointx]

I think the Wiki style for information is kinda half-baked. What I mean is that asking a question and getting a reply is going to facilitate more learning; and make the user happier than a Wiki page with information just sprawled out on it. Plus you need to know what to look for to even find information on a topic, which means that a Google search will still be required most of the time.

We all know that for Ubuntu questions what typically comes up from Google are this forum. So maybe we should have a team sifting through the archives and updating/cleaning/purging information?

[earthpigg]

good questions, koenn. ill first state, again, that i am not firmly stating that i think this is the 100% best route and is superior to all other alternatives. i'm thinking aloud, intentionally exposing a young idea to criticism and tough questions such as yours.


1- why do you think you'll get more people to contribute to a 'fork&translate the arch wiki' effort than to a "rewrite ubuntu wiki" effort ?

a) zillions of people that have already self-selected as contributors to stuff like this are also already familiar with wikipedia's interface. one less barrier to entry for contributors.

quantity and quality of content > all.

accurate content requires active contributors, the more the merrier. making it appealing to contributors, thus, is of vital importance. im sure the vast majority of wikipedia contributors (myself included) started with anonymous minor edits.

b) there is no reason both wiki's cannot co-exist. some may contribute to the wiki-standard ubuntu wiki that would not otherwise care to contribute, and some may contribute to the official ubuntu wiki that would not otherwise care to contribute. the net result could be additional contributors and additional high quality content that would not otherwise exist.


And since documentation needs maintenance : what makes you think the new improved ubuntu wiki won't end up in the same sorry state 12 months after the overhaul ?

the whole thing rests on being as appealing to wiki contributors as possible. if that fails, the project would fail. i'm guessing i am not the only one that has had a wikipedia edit reverted because the new content resembled a manual - among other motives. :D


2- are you pretty sure the arch wiki people are OK with such a fork,

I'm sure that I see this at the bottom of everything at the Arch Wiki:


Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.

and any additional content from this project would be similarly licensed (unlike ubuntuforums.org posts that are still stuck with traditional copyright (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Wiki/Tasks/Forum/import)).


or is this going to be more fuel on the fire of "ubuntu : always leeching, never contributing)

haters gonna hate, trolls gonna troll, why lose sleep? There are significant positive externalities that such folks generally fail to account for:


Every new Ubuntu user today is a potential volunteer programmer or bug report filer for Arch Linux a year from now. And, vice versa. (I myself have participated in the AUR and Arch Forums in very minor ways, for example.)
Any improvement to either distribution (to include documentation) benefits both distributions to at least some extent.
It isn't like it will be a secret from whence the documentation came: some lifted wholesale from the existing ubuntu wiki, some lifted wholesale from arch's wiki. I suspect that many/most Arch Wiki contributors would consider it a compliment (it would certainly be intended as such). Lifting in the other direction would certainly be encouraged, as well.




free bonus:

3- Ever seen this : http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Maverick ?


No, but I like. Perhaps much of the work I suggested has already been done. Glad I posted a humble 'thinking aloud' thread before doing any real work or making any bold declarations. Will have to look, explore, ponder, etc.



Please keep the hits coming and tear all ideas so far presented to shreds. I don't take it personal, my skin is thick anyways, and that is how great ideas (and implementations thereof) are forged. Or, for those ideas that ought to be killed, that is how they are killed.

[earthpigg]

So maybe we should have a team sifting through the archives and updating/cleaning/purging information?

I'm not sure it would be appropriate for one set of people to come along and modify the words of another without their permission.

If permission is needed to migrate a post from UF to the official wiki, permission would certainly be needed to modify someone's words to make them accurate in 2011.

content in a traditional wiki by contrast, is modifiable/improvable/updateable by anyone, by default, without additional conversations needing to occur.

"this is obsolete, i'm fixing it" - done, documented, and revertible.

for those reasons and others, i think that the notion to migrate ubuntuforums.org posts to a wiki are absolutely correct. my only tentative disagreement is with the notion of throwing traditional wiki conventions out the window in the process - anonymous editing by unregistered users is crucial, for example, as is the look/feel that hundreds of millions of people are already familiar with.

for that last point, note that even Ubuntu uses the alt+f4 convention to close a window with the keyboard. hundreds of millions are already familiar with it and that makes it the best, not because there is any objectively good reason why it should be done that way (there isn't).

i also wouldn't be interested in some new-fangled pencil that does exactly what a pencil did (no better and no worse), but required an additional 5 minute or 2 hour learning curve prior to use. that is what i see when i look at the current ubuntu wiki. the wheel has been re-invented for no good reason.

humans are subjective. subjectively, a vibrant wiki ought to adhere to established norms except where there is good reason to deviate.

[Dupointx]

I'm not sure it would be appropriate for one set of people to come along and modify the words of another without their permission.

The only way to avoid this is to leave the archives alone, untouched on the Ubuntu Forums. I think this is the problem at hand since the forum staff have made it clear that the archives are not welcome. Moving posts off the forums, editing them and anything else would obviously need to be approved by the posters or a governing body at the forums.


If permission is needed to migrate a post from UF to the official wiki, permission would certainly be needed to modify someone's words to make them accurate in 2011.

content in a traditional wiki by contrast, is modifiable/improvable/updateable by anyone, by default, without additional conversations needing to occur.

"this is obsolete, i'm fixing it" - done, documented, and revertible.

for those reasons and others, i think that the notion to migrate ubuntuforums.org posts to a wiki are absolutely correct. my only tentative disagreement is with the notion of throwing traditional wiki conventions out the window in the process - anonymous editing by unregistered users is crucial, for example, as is the look/feel that hundreds of millions of people are already familiar with.

for that last point, note that even Ubuntu uses the alt+f4 convention to close a window with the keyboard. hundreds of millions are already familiar with it and that makes it the best, not because there is any objectively good reason why it should be done that way (there isn't).

i also wouldn't be interested in some new-fangled pencil that does exactly what a pencil did (no better and no worse), but required an additional 5 minute or 2 hour learning curve prior to use. that is what i see when i look at the current ubuntu wiki. the wheel has been re-invented for no good reason.

humans are subjective. subjectively, a vibrant wiki ought to adhere to established norms except where there is good reason to deviate.

I think the main objection I have to taking these posts to either a new Wiki or the old one is that all around there is a lack of interest in maintaining the Wiki's. Obviously if the Ubuntu Wiki was used then a majority of the useful information to be found in the archives would already be on it. Since this is not the case then I'm not sure that making a new Wiki would really solve the problem.

I would propose something new. A way to preserve the archives and posts that will fall into it after it's moved, that keeps useful threads and does all the cleaning and other work to be relevant. The difference would be that it would NOT be a Wiki.

[Lucradia]

The wiki ubuntu uses is a bit less polished than normal MediaWiki sites, and I'd rather use normal MediaWiki code than whatever it has.

[castrojo]

Moving posts off the forums, editing them and anything else would obviously need to be approved by the posters or a governing body at the forums.

Someone's done this before, though I don't think it's necessarily a requirement to inform someone, it's all CC licensed.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/boucft/team/gettingpermission

[daengbo]

A huge problem is that Ubuntu just changes too fast. I used to say that Linux was great because everything that I learned in the 90s still basically worked. That was true with Ubuntu until about 8.04. We now see radical overhauls of some application or subsystem every release. I happen to like these changes for the most part, but that makes keeping docs up-to-date almost impossible.

I mean, look at The Ubuntu Manual Project (TUMP). When BH started the discussion on ubuntu-doc all full of vim and vigor, the docs members warned about this problem. TUMP got pretty much written for 10.04 and that was it. The Doc team itself is always rushing to get something out the door, and that doesn't even take into account translators. I mean, are we talking about the small Doc Team re-writing and/or editing the whole wiki every six months? That's insane.

Ultimately, the Doc Team needs to make it easier to become involved: in this, BH was correct. Use an easy wiki with stub articles for all the docs. Make the stubs easy to find. Import from upstream whenever possible. License in a way that make contributors comfortable. Get a way to export the wiki articles to Mallard or Yelp or whatever the team is using right now. Keep the technical details away from 90% of the writers, and you'll have a ton more good writers. Learning a markup language and how to diff just to make a few needed changes is too high a barrier to entry.

[Thewhistlingwind]

Someone's done this before, though I don't think it's necessarily a requirement to inform someone, it's all CC licensed.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/boucft/team/gettingpermission

Also, it's in the EULA. If anyone bothered to read that.......:D

[user1397]

I support this. I think we can learn a thing or two from the arch wiki and if we made a wiki that is that much superior to the current one, they would probably eventually want to just scrap the original one and make the 'unofficial' wiki the 'official' one.

Btw, I had no idea that my tovid thread was on that link (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Wiki/Tasks/Forum/import) you posted, kinda cool haha

Oh and I've followed suit and edited my sig to be similar to yours earthpigg :)

[Scoobin]

I don't think your poll is clear enough.



What do you think?
Great idea.
Horrible Idea in general.
Horible Idea because efforts would be better spent fixing the current ubuntu wiki.
I'd like to see the idea fleshed out more before concluding either way.
I would have thought a drastic overhaul would include fixing the current wiki. Otherwise you are talking about a new wiki.

Also, the only guide to your poll is the thread title. There is no question on the poll itself besides 'What do you think?'.

For the record, I'm totally behind getting a wiki similar to (or is as easy to use as) Archs. That's the strength of using a generic wiki - everyone is familiar with the format and most people who are looking up Ubuntu are likely to know how to navigate it. I'm sorry, but the present one is user-UNfriendly.

So, I say keep the information from the current wiki (where it is fit to be retained, ie not too outdated) and implement an alternate interface for navigating/reading it.

I like these comments so far:

Ultimately, the Doc Team needs to make it easier to become involved: in this, BH was correct. Use an easy wiki with stub articles for all the docs. Make the stubs easy to find. Import from upstream whenever possible. License in a way that make contributors comfortable. Get a way to export the wiki articles to Mallard or Yelp or whatever the team is using right now. Keep the technical details away from 90% of the writers, and you'll have a ton more good writers. Learning a markup language and how to diff just to make a few needed changes is too high a barrier to entry.

[earthpigg]

I mean, look at The Ubuntu Manual Project (TUMP). When BH started the discussion on ubuntu-doc all full of vim and vigor, the docs members warned about this problem. TUMP got pretty much written for 10.04 and that was it. The Doc team itself is always rushing to get something out the door, and that doesn't even take into account translators. I mean, are we talking about the small Doc Team re-writing and/or editing the whole wiki every six months? That's insane.


a phenomenal point. perhaps the primary focus ought to be the latest LTS, with optional articles on 6-month releases if people feel like it?

example: the article on "Restoring Grub" would be exactly and only for 10.04. once 12.04 comes out, the old article would automatically and immediately carry a "warning: this is for 10.04" banner until such time as the article is updated for 12.04, at which point it becomes "Restoring Grub" and pre-12.04-update version would become "Restoring Grub (10.04 LTS)".

if people want to fork LTS articles for 6-month release articles, they are welcome to - but the "Restoring Grub" article itself would only include latest LTS information. If someone felt like making a 10.10 article, it would be "Restoring Grub (10.10)" while "Restoring Grub" itself would be assumed to be 10.04 (or the latest LTS if it is mid-2012 and we aren't all dead).

whatever else i do or do not know on this planet, i am positive that education implementations would prefer this, and i suspect enterprise would as well.

[mips]

Scrap the existing wiki and start from scratch. Use the Arch & Gentoo wikis as a reference standard.

[Dustin2128]

Ubuntu has a wiki? Based on the fact that I've never heard of it, it'd probably be a good idea to make it as relevant and referencable as possible.

[manzdagratiano]

I wholeheartedly agree... I have looked up documentation on the Ubuntu Wiki in the past and have corrected a few pages where the information supplied did not work as intended/was not current. However, I would be lying if I said that I believe the Ubuntu wiki stands anywhere near in comparison to the Arch wiki. The Arch wiki is not just documentation - that is for the man pages - it is basically a chronicled step-by-step guide for somebody to install something from scratch to getting it up and running. Articles on that wiki are pointed and work in virtually every case. That being said, I know this is an issue with what the community chooses to do with their own documentation; but aside from that, I know somebody pointed out before that it is hard to search for things on the wiki, pages do not link to each other very well, and then the whole format of the current wiki which makes it look not like a wiki in the regular sense just bothers me. I would like to see it completely redone, and I am willing to contribute in whatever way I can.