Path: Documentation

About Us

The Documentation Path gets you get started helping with the Ubuntu Dcumentation We are here just to guide you and answer questions. The team that does the actual work is the Documentation Team This team works on both the Community Wiki and the System Documentation.

There are three main areas of documentation, the two main wikis and the system documentation:

• Help.Ubuntu/Community - The main community wiki for help documents for Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu Wiki - This wiki is now used for organizational work, proposals and all materials not belonging to main wiki. Usually this is stuff associated with community teams, but not exclusively

• System Documentation - This is the documentation that comes with Ubuntu, information on it can be found at the link. It's no more involved than doing work on the wiki, don't let the name scare you.

Getting Started

The DocumentationTeam takes care of two main different types of documentation, the documentation wiki and the system documentation that ships with each version of *buntu.

Documentation Teams Structure

1. Ubuntu Documentation Contributors. This is an open team, much like the Beginners Team, which anyone interested in helping with Ubuntu documentation can join to show their interest. Feel free to join this team and learn how to contribute from the DocumentationTeam page. Members of this team frequently:

   • Edit Ubuntu Documentation Wiki pages.
   • Report bugs via Launchpad to the Ubuntu system documentation.
   • Contribute patches to system documentation through Launchpad and Bazaar.
   • Participate on the Ubuntu-doc mailing list and/or in the #ubuntu-doc IRC channel.

2. Ubuntu Documentation Committers. This team has write access to the official system documentation branches. Write access to these branches is restricted because this is the documentation that is included directly with every Ubuntu system. A system of quality control and review is therefore required.

3. Ubuntu Documentation Wiki Administrators. Members of this team have permission to delete or rename wiki pages. This is a restricted action on the help wiki, because the renaming or deletion of wiki pages can often cause unintended problems. This is explained in the relevant section of the Wiki Guide.

Contact Us:
To send an email to the Documentation Team Mailing list - ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com. To subscribe to the Doc Team list visit http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc. The list archive is at http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/. To send an email to the Beginners Team ubuntu-beginners@lists.ubuntu.com -To subscribe to the Beginners Team list visit mailing list.

Editing the Wiki

• A launchpad account is required, this will be used to sign in on both wikis to edit. This mandatory registration allows tracking and prevents malicious edits. Launchpad itself has many other uses associated with contributing to the community you can discover on your own.

  • Note - Ensure you have cookies enabled, so your login is stored.

• Once signed in, go to either of the two wikis above and click Log In at the top. You will be prompted to authenticate via launchpad, proceed and your done. You can now make edits to the wikis.

• Once logged into the Main Community Wiki, you'll notice a small bar at the bottom. This is the edit bar, it holds many options for manipulating pages. Explore and test them out while being careful not to do anything undesirable to pages.

Guidelines and Common Practices Editing the Wiki

Now that your set up to edit, it's important to know what to do. The wiki uses markup, to manipulate the text. Markup is a simple collection of special characters used to instruct the wiki system how to format pages. This allows for bold text or underlining to occur or something more complex like creating tables. Here ae some good resources, help on editing and [[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpOnMoinWikiSyntax | help on Moin wiki syntax.

Recommended Readings for Ubuntu Documentation Wiki Administrators

For membership of this team, we ask that applicants to join have:

• read the Wiki Guide.

• made significant contributions to the help wiki by way of edits to pages.
• demonstrated an understanding of the issues that can arise from deleting and renaming pages, and how to avoid them.

Suggested Reading - Style Guide

All the team's work is subject to our Style Guide.

Questions? Contact the Beginners Team or the Cocumentation team

To send an email to the Beginners Team click here: ubuntu-beginners@lists.ubuntu.com Documentation Mailing List click here: ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com.

Past Efforts by BT to help as a team with wiki documentation

Summer of Documentation 2011
Summer of Documentation 2010
Summer of Documentation 2009
Summer of Documentation 2008

The address for the list is ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com. To subscribe visit http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc. The list archive is at http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/.

CategoryBeginnersTeam