BetterWikiDocs

Revision 14 as of 2005-10-24 10:19:51

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Summary

The documentation on the wiki suffers from a number of problems which are caused by the fact that the current wiki serves many purposes. This is an idea to move the documentation part of the wiki somewhere else. It sounds crazy, but bear with us Smile :)

Rationale

The following problems arise with regard to the documentation currently on the wiki:

  • The wiki has a vast quantity of non-documentation, which is muddling for users in searches.

  • The wiki has many specs with addresses that look like documentation (e.g. BluetoothSupport) which means that users waste time going looking for red herrings

  • The wiki documentation is not in the same place as the static documentation released by the Documentation Team at [http://help.ubuntu.com help.ubuntu.com] - this leads to users having to search more than one place and general fragmentation of documentation.

  • There is a team of editors on the wiki (WikiTeam) but because all users have the same rights, pages occasionally get rewritten, moved and deleted in ways which create non-trivial problems.

We merged the UDU wiki into the main Ubuntu wiki in August and the Edubuntu wiki followed in October. There are some benefits to having all content gathered in one place, but there are also drawbacks. Documentation can now be difficult to find among the Specs and community-related pages. The performance has also degraded as the number of pages and revisions have increased. We basically need to think about how we will scale.

Use cases

Scope

Design

Options:

  • Split out wikis based on content (not distro) and use interwiki winks. These could run on separate machines and have separate search, but login should be managed centrally. Wiki instances might include: teams.u.c, help.u.c, teams.u.c, specs.u.c, and wiki.u.c (I guess people.u.c is already used).
  • Alternatively a more simple division could be used, with help.u.c used for both stable and wiki based documentation, and wiki.u.c (or dev.u.c) used for development and community.
  • Look into moin development like clustering and caching techniques (non exist so far AFAIK).

A workable solution for the problem with people deleting and renaming pages is to implement access level control: thus is it possible to limit delete/rename rights to a group of editors who know what they are doing, and leave editing rights open to all. See HelpOnAccessControlLists. This _could_ be implemented on the current Ubuntu wiki, but it would lead to inconvenience for developers (e.g. MOTU) who work on fast changing pages, which often need to be deleted and renamed.

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

Problems with moving the wiki documentation would mainly involve LINK-BREAKING. For example:

  • A google search for Ubuntu Wiki Sudo leads to: RootSudo. Lots of people will have that page bookmarked. Moving the documentation would break this link.

There are a number of possible solutions to such a problem, none of which are perfect:

  • Use #refresh to automatically redirect the user onto a new wiki page (not currently enabled on the Ubuntu wiki), see HelpOnProcessingInstructions and HelpOnConfiguration

  • Use #redirect onto a specifically created page. The recent Italian wiki migration has done this, for example see the page ItalianSudo.

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec