HelpWikiQualityAssurance

Summary

This spec aims at introducing features to the documentation wiki (https://help.ubuntu.com/community) to allow greater quality assurance and to inform users about the reliability of the pages they are reading.

Rationale

The documentation wiki is increasingly important for the development of documentation and in the future might conceivably be the only place that documentation for the Ubuntu project develops. It is also freely editable by anyone. As a result, quality assurance and social control is of vital importance. It is also important that the user gets a good impression of how reliable a particular document is when reading it. Completion of this specification will allow us to present the official documentation alongside community contributions.

Use cases

  • Jane is looking for information about how to install a program. She finds a page contributed by a community member, but has no way of telling how reliable it is.
  • Bill has found a document about using a program, but doesn't know whether it is valid for the version of Ubuntu that he is using.
  • Jamie comes across a document which contains some information which doesn't work on his machine, and wants to report it to somebody.

Scope

The documentation wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community

Design

  1. Cleanup

    • See discussion on the MoinMoin mailing list. A solution may be:

    • Establish some concrete categories of cleanup that different pages require. Not too many, but enough to encapsulate what we need. We can look at the different categories that Wikipedia uses and learn from them.

    • Write a macro which responds to (something similar to) [[Cleanup(tag)]] where tag is one of the categories identified

    • The macro should automatically show a prominent box to the user at the top of the page which includes the reason that the page has been tagged with Cleanup.

    • We can then generate lists of pages which have been tagged with this macro by doing a [[FullSearch]] on the text used to call the macro.

  2. Version applicability

    • Make it clear to the user what version of Ubuntu a particular document applies to.

    • Write a simple macro which responds to something like [[Version(5.10,6.06)]]. The macro should show a box to the user at the top of the page which explains which versions the document applies to.

  3. Feedback

    • Make it easy for users to give feedback on the wiki. This can be done by:
      1. Expanding the use of talk pages and developing a comment box with which users can easily submit comments. The user should not have to create the talk page manually where it does not already exist.
      2. Include links in the standard page layout which encourage users to submit bugs or write to the documentation team.

Implementation

  1. Cleanup

    • The proposed categories for cleanup are as follows:

      1. Style - this page needs to be brought in line with the wiki's style guidelines for documentation

      2. Review - this page needs to be reviewed for technical accuracy

      3. Update - this page needs to be updated to include information about the latest version of Ubuntu

      4. Unsupported - this page may contain information which is not supported by the Ubuntu developers and may damage your system.

      5. Formatting - this page needs some work to improve its formatting

      6. Expansion - the content on this page is too brief and needs expanding

    • Some progress has been made on using the Include macro to do what we want by PhilBull, see Philbull/Test.

    • Philbull has also modified Asommer's Version macro (see below) to display QA information. The code is available from his bzr branch, and you can see a screenshot here.

  2. Version applicability

    • A similar macro to that used under Cleanup should be developed to insert version applicability into the page.

    • A macro developed by Asommer and PhilBull implements this part of the spec. Currently the macro is available from Adam's bzr branch. You can see a screenshot of the macro running on a test installation of Moin here.

  3. Feedback

    • The theme for the wiki will be updated so that at the foot of each page there is a link to the /talk page for each page. The talk page should be created automatically where it does not exist and should automatically contain the [[PageComment2]] macro, which would do nicely for inserting comments (homepage). This is easily done by forcing the new page to use a particular template, in a similar way that the NewPage macro currently works. However, this currently will result in the page being overwritten where it already exists. Upgrading to Moin 1.5 would avoid this problem (see http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinBugs/NewPageOverwritesExistingPage).

Code

Unresolved issues

  • Macro testing
  • Installing macros on the live server

BoF agenda and discussion

Please feel free to add comments to the /talk page.

CategorySpec

HelpWikiQualityAssurance (last edited 2008-08-06 16:37:07 by localhost)