BetterWikiDocs

Revision 41 as of 2006-01-27 10:34:39

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Summary

The documentation on the wiki suffers from a number of problems which are broadly caused by the fact that the current wiki serves many purposes at the same time. This spec aims to move the documentation to a separate wiki.

Rationale

We merged the UDU wiki into the main Ubuntu wiki in August and the Edubuntu wiki followed in October (see ["wiki/MergerPlan"]. This followed a general policy of not fragmenting wiki's if at all possible. There are some benefits to having all content gathered in one place, but, in the case of documentation, some drawbacks have become apparent. For clarity, the example of a user trying to setup Bluetooth will be used in what follows.

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. For example, if a user searches page titles for "Bluetooth", he finds [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=Bluetooth&titlesearch=Titles 5 results], even though only 2 of those results are documentation. If he does a text-based search, the results are much worse.

  • The wiki has many specs with addresses that look like documentation which means that users waste time going looking for red herrings. This problem is related to the first one. For a list of all the Specs, see CategorySpec. There are about 300 of them! Apart from specs, there are many pages which clog up searches when users are searching for documentation.

  • 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.

  • The performance/speed of the wiki has degraded as the number of pages and revisions have increased.
  • People cannot find their documentation as easily as they should because (a) it is in more than one place (as explained above) and (b) there is no obvious link to it from the main Ubuntu website (the tab "Wiki" is not helpful, and the "Support" area is out of date).

The above points mean that the wiki is currently not a good resource for documentation.

Design

This involves moving the wiki documentation to help.ubuntu.com and merging the distro documentation in with it.

Implementation

There are three steps.

Setup New Wiki

Setup a Moin wiki on the Canonical/Ubuntu moin farm for use as help.ubuntu.com. Configure this server to include the following features:

  • Access controls - normal users will not be able to delete/move pages. A wiki editor group will have control over certain core pages, such as the index and distro documentation. See wiki:MoinMaster/HelpOnAccessControlLists

  • Launchpad authentication

  • Customised theme and possibly additional Macros/parsers (wiki:MoinMaster/HelpOnParsers) for adding html documentation

This is all really easy.

Migration of pages

This involves two stages:

  1. Moving the pages
    • We'd probably need a script which does something like this (this would probably require some developer time):

      • Searches for pages which contain the phrase "CategoryDocumentation. Specifically, the script should search data/pages/PageName/revisions/latestrevision for that string, for all values of "PageName".

      • For each page as identified above, copies the relevant folder to the new wiki.
  2. Replace old pages with redirect solution. It is imperative to keep the old urls for important pages valid. There are two reasonable options. The script would also need to implement this for all the pages which have been moved.

Hosting of html documentation on the new wiki

Integration of the distro documentation (currently hosted as html on [http://help.ubuntu.com/ help.ubuntu.com] with the Moin wiki. The distro docs are written in docbook xml and built as html. The best way of inserting them directly into the Moin wiki is via the html parser, testing is underway on the [http://help.ubuntu.com/wiki/FaqGuide2 help.ubuntu.com test wiki].

CategorySpec