Introduction

The Wiki Focus Group is for Beginners Team Members and Padawans who want to help update and maintain the documentation for Ubuntu.

This focus group works as part of the Documentation Team contributing towards their efforts on both the Community Wiki and the System Documentation. This can get confusing, but shouldn't. To be clear, the Documentation Team isn't part of the Beginners Team, but we are a group that associates with them for convenience so that we can coordinate efforts and prevent duplication.

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

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ - The main community wiki for help documents for Ubuntu.

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ - This wiki is now used for organizational work, proposals and all materials not belonging to main wiki.

• 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.

Please see New Users section for a list of resources and steps to getting started.

Current Tasks

We are working on the Community Docs with the following goals:

1. Keep track of your work on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Beginners/Development.

2. Use the Tag functionality throughout the community docs to mark pages that need attention.

   1. Work on improving the tagged pages, specifically for Needs Expansion, Content Cleanup, Style Cleanup, and Page Too Long.

   2. The Wiki Cleanup offers good advice on cleaning up common problems.

3. Orphaned Pages - These are pages with nothing linking to them. Help them find friends! Tag and update as needed.

4. Other Wiki tasks listed at DocumentationTeam/Wiki/Tasks

5. As an aside for those interested, work on System Documentation bugs

   1. See DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation for more information on how.

Summer of Documentation 2009
Summer of Documentation 2008

Meetings

Meetings should be scheduled at least a week in advance, they will be announced to the Beginners Team mailing list, so make sure your signed up. They can also be found on the Team Meetings page.

Meetings are held in the Beginners Team IRC channel - #ubuntu-beginners - or the Documentation Team IRC channel - #ubuntu-doc - both on irc.freenode.net

Meeting Agenda

New Users

The focus groups leadership and membership is as follows:
Lead: starcraft.man
Co-Lead: Placeholder
Members: Membership

Feel free to contact any of the above on IRC with questions regarding team and related projects. There are several steps to join, if your confused or unsure at any step don't be shy. We are here to help.

Contact Us:
The best way is IRC. Join the irc.freenode.net server, we hang out in the #ubuntu-beginners (Beginners Team main channel) and #ubuntu-doc (official Doc Team) channels. Relevant stuff can also be brought up on either the BT or Doc mail list.

Required and Recommended Reading

To get a good grasp of what we do, please CAREFULLY READ through the following documents in order and ask anyone on the team if you have any questions. Note, these link only to the top level page, there are numerous sub pages that should also read and understand. The pages are:

Required

1. Doc Team Home

2. Mentoring for New Members

3. Team Organization

4. Introduction to Wiki

Recommended

1. System Documentation

2. Document Translation

Joining the Teams

To join this focus group, please talk to the lead/co-lead first. Once they have been notified, feel free to add yourself to the team list. You should already be signed up to the BT mail list as part of joining the main Beginners team (or at the very least a paddy).

Joining the documentation team is also easy and done in two steps.

• Join the Ubuntu Documentation Contributors Launchpad team

  • If you don't have a launchpad account, see the editing section below.

• Join the Documentation Team mailing list

  • Send an email to the mailing list introducing yourself to the team.

Hanging out in our two main IRC channels is strongly encouraged and will help you get to know the team, and get quick answers to question as you get started.

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

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.

Required Reading:

• Wiki Guide - A set of pages explaining markup and general formatting, read all of them thoroughly.

  • Formatting Guide - Pay special attention to this page, it and it's sub pages that deal with how the formatting works.

  • The Writing Guide and Style Guide - Offer insight into how pages should be written stylistically.

  • Icons - Images can be useful when properly worked into a page.

• Wiki Sandbox - A sandbox, experiment with markup and editing tools as you like. The best learning is done hands on.

• Communication - A few extra pointers on staying in contact and courtesy.

Advanced Recommended Reading:

• Style Guide References - Additional materials on technical and documentation writing.

• The Tag System - Used throughout the main wiki to mark what needs reviewing.

• Deletion and Renaming - Such tasks are only done by admins, but it is best if you make their lives easier. There are only a few.

• Redirecting - Can be useful to redirect pages or common alternate names to a main page.

• EditMoin - Some prefer to edit the wiki pages from a desktop text editor, this package allows you to do so.

• Macros - How to use macros.

System Documentation

Members interested in contributing to the system documentation should review the following links that are of interest, in addition to the System Documentation page mentioned before.

• Repository - Explanation of the repository, where all the docs are located and how they are maintained.

  • Bazaar in five minutes - A quick start up guide for new users to using the version system bazaar.

• Reviewing Documentation - Quick checklist for reviewing docs.

• Tech Review - Explanation of the review process.

  • Tech Review Example - An example of review process, see Repository section for patching and submission process.

CategoryBeginnersTeam