The new wiki is now available
Since this blog was posted, the new wiki has gone live at https://wiki.ubuntu.com .
You can log in with your Ubuntu One account start editing right away.
A launch announcement is scheduled for later today.
Over many years, the wiki became an important hub of Ubuntu information, thanks to incredible contributions from community members and volunteers. Content creators, editors, and moderators all worked together to share their knowledge and skills. Just like the old wiki, we’ll need community members to make the new Ubuntu wiki a source of high quality information.
In future project updates, we’ll let you know of ways that you can get involved, so stay tuned!
Posts in the Ubuntu wiki project series
Background of the wiki project
The Ubuntu wiki is scheduled to be decommissioned in August 2026.
In fact, two public Ubuntu wikis will be decommissioned:
- The Ubuntu wiki: previously at wiki.ubuntu.com
- The Community Help wiki: help.ubuntu.com/community
Until recently, there was even a third wiki at canonical.wiki.com, for internal use at Canonical.
In anticipation of the decommissioning of the public wikis, a small team at Canonical have been working on setting up a new Ubuntu wiki.
History of the wiki
The Ubuntu wiki was born in 2004, the same year that Warty Warthog was released. Over the course of 20+ years, it was built by the combined efforts of many contributors.
This wiki alone has tens of thousands of pages, spanning developer discussions, meeting minutes, membership applications, technical documentation, and more.
In recent years, however, the wiki has become less reliable as a way to find and share information.
Problems with the wikis
The current wikis have issues relating to:
- Content: The wikis are filled with outdated information that is not useful to most users. Users sometimes find old wiki pages instead of up-to-date versions in the official Ubuntu documentation. A lot of the most popular pages have been migrated to official documentation already, including the Ubuntu project documentation.
- Security: The wikis are built with a version of the MoinMoin wiki platform that is still on Python 2. This means that the wikis no longer receive important security patches.
- Identity: The wikis have served multiple functions, several of which are now handled by other platforms. We use Discourse for discussions, Read the Docs for official documentation, and the Canonical library for internal documentation. In this context, it has become less obvious what purpose the wikis have.
- Usability: The wikis have become difficult to use. Users have issues registering and logging in. Page loads can be slow. The styling of the wikis is not up to modern web standards and the wikis can perform poorly on mobile.
- Two wikis: There is no obvious reason for having two distinct Ubuntu wikis. It is unclear when we should use one rather than the other. Ideally, there would be a single, good community wiki.
Current status of the wiki project
At Canonical, a small cross-team effort is involved in setting up the new Ubuntu wiki. It is a collaboration between technical authors, platform engineers, community engineers, designers, and Ubuntu engineers.
We are working on a remote instance of the wiki that we are using for initial testing and configuration. It is in the early stages of development and is not yet publicly available. We are targeting an Alpha release of the wiki in 2026 and will consult with the community during the process.
This series
In future posts, we will update you on the development of the Ubuntu wiki, some of the thinking that has gone into the project, and how you can get involved as a community.
Acknowledgements
Much thanks to Robert Kratky (@rkratky), Aaron Prisk (@aaronprisk), and Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) for reviewing early versions of this post.