In A New Ubuntu Wiki Part 1: Announcement, I gave some background on the wiki project, the history of the Ubuntu wiki, and some issues with the current implementation.
Here, I discuss our choice of wiki engine, Ubuntu theming, and the features that we have been testing so far.
Posts in the Ubuntu wiki project series
Call for feedback
The wiki engine that we have selected provides a solid platform for developing a new Ubuntu wiki. Canonical engineers are actively working on deploying and hosting this wiki for the Ubuntu community.
In addition to deployment, we have been theming, customizing, and extending the wiki to provide a better contributor experience compared to our current wiki.
The health and quality of the new Ubuntu wiki will depend on community engagement, so we need your feedback!
Are there any features that you would like? Do you have any suggestions to improve the experience for contributors or admins?? Please let us know and we can factor your ideas into our planning and testing.
Choosing a wiki engine
The current Ubuntu wikis are built using the Moinmoin platform. The stable version of Moinmoin uses the sunsetted Python 2. A Python 3 version of this wiki exists but it is not yet production-ready.
We reviewed multiple candidate wiki engines and tested two extensively. Ultimately, we opted for MediaWiki.
MediaWiki is a FOSS wiki, maintained by the Wikimedia foundation. It is used in prominent and successful wikis, most notably Wikipedia but also the Arch wiki. Debian is in the process of a similar migration of their wiki from Moinmoin to MediaWiki.
MediaWiki is stable, well-maintained, and battle-tested.
How the new Ubuntu wiki looks
Theme
The theme that we are developing is consistent with the Ubuntu theming used on other Ubuntu websites, including Discourse and the official Ubuntu documentation.
Users can switch between light, dark, and automatic (OS) modes. These and other preferences will be saved for future sessions.
The interface is customizable. Users can hide or dock menus, adjust text width and size, and customize their editing experience. Despite what you may have heard about MediaWiki’s age, the user experience is smooth and responsive.
Homepage layout
A modern user coming to a wiki for the first time might not know where to start. Traditionally, wikis have relied heavily on the internal search function. Wiki homepages, including the homepage of wiki.ubuntu.com, may not provide immediate entry-points to actual content.
Following principles adopted in the official Ubuntu documentation, but also the example of the Arch wiki, we propose a layout for the homepage that includes a compact set of useful links. This includes general pages about Ubuntu and also specific pages organized by domains-of-concern:
Features of the wiki
MediaWiki comes with excellent core functionality and a rich ecosystem of plugins to extend that functionality. Below are some highlight features that we have explored so far.
Visual editing
The Ubuntu wiki is not just for developers or highly-technical users. It is open — in principle — to anyone who is interested in Ubuntu. For this reason, a fully-functioning visual editor is a key feature, as it resembles how many people edit text in their daily lives.
The visual editor allows a user to simply click Edit on a page and immediately edit the page as it appears when they read it (WYSIWYG). Technical users can switch to editing the source markup directly if they prefer, where they will get a live preview of their edits.
The general editing experience has many other quality-of-life features, including recovery of unsaved edits:
Autosuggestions
A wiki becomes a densely inter-linked collection of information as it grows. A wiki is not very effective if readers or editors cannot find that information.
When you type into the search input in the new wiki, pages are automatically suggested:
In the visual editor, there are shortcuts for common tasks like creating links. Helpfully, this link dialog also provides autosuggestion of link targets:
These features make it easy to find pages and create links between them, which are fundamental activities when building and maintaining a wiki.
Anonymous editing
Wikis are supposed to be quick. If you spot an error on a page, you should be able to fix it in seconds, without needing to be accepted onto a list of approved editors, without navigating to a second website, and without creating a pull request.
We plan to make the wiki open to anonymous users, as well as those who are registered and logged-in with an account.
This is enabled by light-touch moderation of new users.
Moderation
When a new user creates a page or edits an existing one, their edit enters a moderation queue, during which time their change is not yet public. The user is notified that the page has entered moderation and they can continue to edit their version.
Users with moderation rights are notified so that they can review the changes, and mark them as accepted, rejected, or spam.
This is intended to be light-touch and fast. It is only for identifying spam and vandalism, not for assessing quality or finding typos. Trusted users will not undergo moderation.
Discussions
Discourse will remain the best place for general discussions about Ubuntu.
The discussion feature in the Ubuntu wiki serves the specific purpose of discussing and improving the wiki itself. Each wiki page has its own discussion section, with useful functionality like the ability to @ other contributors.
The maintainers of the Arch wiki highlight the usefulness of this tool in cases when a contributor wishes to propose major changes to a page.
UX and accessibility
Many of the design choices made for MediaWiki are based on extensive and publicly-available user research, such as this example supporting the implementation of sticky headers.
The new Ubuntu wiki benefits from various design affordances that improve the user experience, including but not limited to:
- A theme that is responsive.
- An interface that supports keybinds and a keyboard-based workflow.
- An editor that supports multiple modes of interaction, including WYSIWYG, source editing, and slash commands.
Below is an example of the editing interface on mobile:
Additional wiki status updates
Public release
We are still anticipating a public alpha some time in 2026.
The Community team at Canonical is a key part of this wiki project. They will onboard testers when the public version is available and help establish community guidelines.
A good wiki is not created the day that the right wiki engine is selected.
Key aspects behind the success of the Arch wiki have been solid community guidelines for contributing, an active community of contributors, and committed maintainers.
Migrating content from the old Ubuntu wikis
Migration of the old wiki content started several months ago.
The most visited pages in wiki.ubuntu.com were identified and migrated to official Ubuntu documentation, including the new Ubuntu project documentation.
This still leaves thousands of pages. While many of these have low traffic, we do not want to simply delete them. Not only would we lose 20+ years of history, we would also lose the opportunity to recover any information that is later deemed useful.
We want to make an archive of both Ubuntu wikis publicly available and have initiated this process. We will update you as soon as we have more concrete details.
Future posts in this series
We are planning to explore the topic of the Ubuntu wiki further in future blogs:
- How the wiki fits together with other Ubuntu platforms
- The relationship between the wiki and the official Ubuntu documentation
- When the wiki is the best place for new information
- Community guidelines and workflows
If you are interested in seeing any other blogs about the wiki, let us know.
Acknowledgements
Much thanks to Marek Suchanek (@marek-suchanek), Robert Kratky (@rkratky), Aaron Prisk (@aaronprisk), and Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) for reviewing early versions of this post.