Ubuntu MATE Wiki

Well, I am no techie. Just a reasonably competent user. That being the case, though, I am more than happy contributing in terms of regular-user-level tutorials and the like. Largely, it would just be a case of gathering up what I have written here and elsewhere and tidying/updating/standardizing it a bit.

Also, thanks for the info on the wiki spanner. Though, how do people then search for and access that wiki as a wiki?

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That’s a slight drawback of using the forum as a wiki. As it is just a topic/post, they can be discovered with the usual search facility. The user could limit the search to a specific category (containing these wiki’s) if they’d like to filter out the help/support topics.

A green edit icon appears on posts that are wiki too.

Now that I know about the wiki posts, this is my opinion and workaround (obviously it is just my opinion) I would prefer a separate wiki page for documenting of UM purposes than forum threads because it makes it look more formal and you can create a wiki page as an index.

This way documentation would have topics like “Installing UM”, “Troubleshooting”, “Known issues”, “Configuring UM” while tutorials that tend to took like “non official stuff” would go to the forum in a wiki post, e.g. “make UM look like Mac OS”, “Rotate images with GIMP using Caja’s context menu”.

A workaround may be make a wiki post as an index page (forum wiki page) and add there the links to the tutorials/official documentation and also to make the tutorials (as documentation topic) look more formal shuldn’t have responses and of course should be wikis.

:ear:

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On the formal/informal I am referring to stuff like this. It’s like how to install and then starts a chat about how messy was the house and it took two days to the plumber to fix it WTH!

I’m always keen to support the community in what ever they are interested in creating. So we can definitely do something like this, question is why divide up where to look for stuff?

Everyone comes here, and as has been stated, we can make posts wiki editable. My concern would be we end up with two places to find help and both would be lower quality.

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I agree with the principle of keeping everything in one place. :slight_smile:

When I signed up here their were around 30 others and not enough information that I needed. My how it has grown since I had time to even log in to read any posts. I thought this OS was a near perfect base system. With the Atlantic hurricane season in full swing and taking aim at my island paradise home I’ve been preoccupied.

Agreed @Wimpy, one quality place would be nice, the less repeat clutter the better. I signed into this community while trying to set UM up on older equipment (2 computers one HP media center desktop and one laptop ThinkPad R61i) and looking for basic information bits. I ended up searching other wiki pages and community sites finding what I needed instead of posting questions I figured were answered else where. It took some research but between LinuxQuestions.org & Ubuntu’s community support this newbie figured it out without re-asking already answered questions.

Being a minimalist and a tinkerer I have since set up both dual boot systems with Ubuntu Studio 16.04 for its inclusion of most, if not all open source graphic arts programs. Once I figure out which ones I like best I will either remove the unwanted ones from Studio or hopefully install the ones I want into UM.

Any progress on this idea?

Alternative Wikis to maintain if we don’t want to create our own:

Sorry, there is no plans for a dedicated wiki.

Reasons being:

  • Discourse already has a wiki facility. New topics created in Tips, Tricks & Tutorials are wiki by default. It also has the ability to search.
  • There is a risk that a dedicated wiki space causes information to become duplicated and outdated (as all things Ubuntu MATE are here)
  • @Wimpy and the MATE Team learnt that it’s best to minimize the number of self hosted things.

What was being put together was a pinned “index” that linked useful topics in the community, so we should dig that out that draft and get it published.

Sounds good! Can we link from the menu to this section and call it Wiki?

Helps new users to find it.

I think link to the “Wiki” from the community page, which needs a little work to make the Ubuntu MATE community looks more prominent. My eyes are drawn to the social network icons.

I am not sure I would search for the Wiki under Community. Might just be me. But Wiki is more like documentation and not a community per se.

So I blew off the dust off this index draft that was put together many months ago. It’s also a wiki so anyone can add their topic to the lists.

It’s more or less a portal to the wiki posts that are on this forum. It’s over to the community to expand and ensure high quality topics. Links have been added to the website and community headers too, so I’d suspect topics will get a little more exposure and traffic. :slight_smile:

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@lah7 Thank you for working on this. It looks great! This will certainly help people find useful resources and provides a way for content writers to promote their work :smiley:

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@lah7 this looks cool! Thanks also for adding the menu entry. On to contributing my first wiki entry. :slight_smile:

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Also credit to @anon42388993 for putting together some of the index quite some time ago. :ok_hand:

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Can I add both my tips and tutorials as well those of other users?

If I have a doubt that my post is suitable to be added or in which section, may I ask to an administrator?

It’s a community resource, so please add if you think they should be “featured” in the index or if searching / looking around is sufficient.

There is no right or wrong, I guess. More categories could be added to group different kinds of tutorials/tips together.

Due to the lack of maintenance and staleness of the links, the wiki portal has been discontinued.

We should focus our efforts on creating helpful topics in #tips-tricks-and-tutorials that can be discovered by search :mag: or by looking up tags.

There will be an update to the Ubuntu MATE website later this year, in which tags may be more prominent. The wiki portal doesn't fit in with any future plans, as it doesn't seem like a valuable resource. Worth a try though.

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