Ubuntu Wiki

Summary

The [:MOTU] wiki has grown a lot over time. It has pages that are out of date, inaccurate, duplicate information. This confuses new contributors. We are going to fix this by dealing very strictly with it. We'll have definite documentation and will fix namespace issues.

Rationale

Documentation is our biggest help in getting new contributors started. Having documentation easily available is the most efficient way in sharing our knowledge and learning ourselves.

Use Cases

Daniel forgot how to use the quilt patch system, he searches for "patching sources" and finds the wiki page.

Sébastien finds himself explaining how to do a merge for the third time this month. He simply points the new contributor to the definite guide.

Matt wonders how development processes differ between main and universe. [:UbuntuDevelopment] answers his questions.

Michael wonders, what the [:MOTU] team is about, he checks out the wiki page and finds that it's the team, where Universe development is happening, that it adheres to [:UbuntuDevelopment] and its wiki pages are tidy and easy to read.

Assumptions

It's easier to learn about [:UbuntuDevelopment] in general. Having two namespaces with different explanations of the same thing make it harder to understand.

Design

• We will cut down duplication of wiki pages and have definite guides.

• The [:MOTU] wiki pages will just explain about very team specific things, like meetings. Lots of information will be in subsections of [:UbuntuDevelopment].

Implementation

• We will work down the list of [:MOTU/WikiCleanUp/WorkList] and clean up page by page.

• We will tag pages that can be removed as [:CategoryMOTURemove] and add [[Include(MOTU/Headers/WikiRemove)]].

• We will add [[Include(MOTU/Headers/WikiMergeUbuntuDev)]] to pages that need to be moved to [:UbuntuDevelopment] and subsections of it. Maybe we can use [:CategoryProcess] to better find pages including information that is general and process-related.

  • If the documentation exceeds a few paragraphs, we're going for UbuntuDevelopment/SomeProcessDoc and link to it from [:UbuntuDevelopment] with a short summary.

  • We tag the page with ["CategoryMOTUUbuntuDevMerge"].
• [:MOTU/Mentoring] and [:MOTU/Documentation] (and related pages) should go to [:UbuntuDevelopment/Learning].

• We'll add [[Include(MOTUMenuHeader)]] to [:MOTU] wiki pages to give them an official blessing.

To sum up the idea in a 'rule of thumb':

• Process and documentation information should be easily findable and avoid the risk of duplication.
• We can stick to names that are well known already, like [:MOTU], [:MOTU/School], [:MOTU/Council] and so on, but they should refer to more general information, where possible.

• The bits that in their core are really MOTU-centric are very few.

Migration

We will have redirects from old URLs to new ones.

[:CategoryMOTU]BR [CategorySpec]