Ubuntu Wiki:About

The Ubuntu wiki is a place to share and maintain content of general interest to Ubuntu users.

Identity

The wiki is made for the community by the community. The Ubuntu community is diverse and the wiki should have something for everyone.

Note on usage of wiki for internal documentation

Canonical teams should not use this wiki for internal team documentation unless they believe it is of interest to the community and are open to contributions from the community.

Relaunch of the wiki

In September 2026, the Ubuntu wiki was relaunched.

About 10 months before, in November 2025, it was announced that the old wiki(s) were scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2026. In anticipation of the decommissioning, a small team within Canonical started making plans for an eventual replacement.

Multiple public communications on the Ubuntu Discourse were made throughout the project.

When announcing the project, some issues with the old wiki were outlined, relating to content, security, and other aspects:

• Announcing the project to make a new wiki

In January 2026, it was announced that the new wiki would use the MediaWiki wiki engine. Possible features were outlined and feedback was sought from the community:

• Overview of features in the new wiki

In early February, some of the challenges facing a new wiki, with respect to its relationship with other platforms, including the Discourse forum, the official documentation on Read the Docs, and Matrix chats, were discussed:

• How the wiki relates to other content platforms

In late February, an archive of content from both old wikis was made available in preparation for their deprecation. The purpose of the archives was to prevent content from getting lost during the move to the new wiki and to make it available to the community for future migrations:

• Making public archives of the old Ubuntu wikis

In mid-July, after a series of meetings where the wiki project was discussed, the Communications council unanimously approved the plan for the new MediaWiki-based wiki, pointing to the archived content from the old wiki and previous announcements on the project:

• Governance council votes on the new wiki

At the end of July, a fully-functional staging instance of the wiki was made available for testing:

• Pre-launch update

In mid-September, after a delay of several weeks, the wiki was relaunched, with an accompanying

• Announcement

Relationship to Ubuntu docs

The wiki complements Ubuntu's official documentation, which is developed more cautiously under the stewardship of dedicated engineering teams who have a professional responsibility to maintain the documentation as part of a product.

In comparison, it is much easier to make an edit or create a page on the wiki. This means it can be used to generate and connect ideas quickly on a wide range of topics relevant to the Ubuntu community.

How the wiki is built

It's built using MediaWiki, the same wiki engine used by Wikipedia and also other Linux wikis, including Arch and Fedora.

The MediaWiki instance is deployed as a charm. The skin is a customized version of the Vector 2022 skin.

The wiki is hosted on Canonical infrastructure as a service to the Ubuntu community.

Content

For the wiki to grow, we need you to make edits and create pages.

Types of content

A page submitted to the wiki should meet the following criteria:

1. It is interesting or useful to the Ubuntu community
2. It does not duplicate information that is easy to find elsewhere

Given this is a wiki about a Linux distribution, there will be a lot of technical content; however, your contribution doesn't need to be technical. For some examples of non-technical content, look at the history category.

Missing pages

If you think a page is missing, you should create the page, assuming you have the necessary permissions.

If a page from the old wiki is missing then you should migrate the page from the archives.

All of the information from both of the old wikis is archived publicly on GitHub.

Reporting bugs

You may find bugs or issues with the wiki when using it as a reader, editor, or administrator.

Using Discourse

Please send reports to the Communications Council on the Ubuntu community Discourse.

There are two ways of sending the report. Make sure you are logged in, then either:

• Send a DM with @comms-council as the recipient, or
• Go to discourse.ubuntu.com/g/comms-council and post a message.

Contributing to the code

The code for the wiki is spread across several GitHub repositories.

If you are comfortable with GitHub, issues, and Pull Requests, you are welcome to contribute directly.

Repositories

• Wiki skin: github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-mediawiki-extension
• Wiki charm: github.com/canonical/mediawiki-k8s-operator