It’s been a while since I updated you on the new Ubuntu wiki.
Mostly that’s because we’ve been really busy working on the wiki.
Previous public communications about the wiki project
You can use the new wiki now
We have deployed the wiki in a staging environment. It is publicly available and editable:
To log in and start editing, you only need an Ubuntu One account.
Consider it a Beta
There will be rough edges. The wiki might have temporary down-time. While we intend to preserve all wiki accounts and edits from this point until launch, data loss is possible.
This is essentially the wiki that will be available on launch, we just need to switch to the wiki.ubuntu.com url and make some additional tweaks.
Theming
We have made various improvements to the Ubuntu wiki theme, including:
- Adding a dark/light mode toggle
- Updating fonts and palette
- Adding Vanilla-style callout boxes
- Making a large number of layout fixes
- Improving the mobile experience
Desktop screenshots
After
Before
Mobile screenshots
After (left) and Before (right)
We expect to make further improvements before launch and are aware of some contrast issues that we need to fix.
You can track progress and report bugs on the GitHub repository for the theme:
github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-mediawiki-skin
Features
We added various extensions and customization to improve the user experience.
- SSO: all you need to log in and edit is an Ubuntu One account.
- CodeMirror: enables syntax highlighting and linting when editing pages in source mode. It also provides useful editing functionality, like multiple cursors.
- Moderation: due to some technical issues, and concerns about friction for new contributors that emerged during governance discussions, we removed the Moderation extension.
Multi-cursor editing example
Governance
The team working on the wiki project had several productive meetings with the Communications council in recent weeks.
Topics for discussion included, but were not limited to:
- The chosen wiki platform
- Users, groups, and permissions
- Escalation procedures
- Moderation approach
- AI policy
These meetings led to several modifications and improvements to the governance model. Based on the revised version, the council voted unanimously in favor of proceeding with the plan for the new wiki.
A key theme of our discussions was keeping the wiki as open as possible, to make it frictionless for contributors, while also ensuring suitable protections are in place. That’s what we’ve tried to do.
Quality tracking
We added several tracking categories, such as “stub”, “documentation candidate”, and “tidying candidate”.
You can mark a page as being a {{stub}}, for example. This will add a pretty callout on the page, but also add that page to the stub category. These tracking categories are grouped, and make it easier for wiki maintainers to find work to do.
Redirect experience
When the wiki launches, you won’t have access to the two old wikis. Here’s how it will work if you try to visit an old page.
wiki.ubuntu.com
When the wiki launches, it will be hosted at wiki.ubuntu.com. This means that if you try to access an old wiki page at wiki.ubuntu.com/<some-old-page> you will be taken to some-old-page on the new wiki.
help.ubuntu.com/community
Redirects will be set up for wiki pages from the community wiki:
help.ubuntu.com/community/<some-old-page> => wiki.ubuntu.com/<some-old-page>
—
If you try to access an old wiki page that isn’t on the wiki, because it hasn’t been migrated, then you will be presented with the following:
- A link to search for similar pages on the wiki
- An option to create the page
- A link to the wiki archives
- A link that searches for the page in the archive
If you want to migrate a page at that point, you can do so.
Archiving
As previously announced, an archive of the old wikis is available on GitHub, and remains a useful resource.
But when I saw what @aaronprisk did with his archiving work for the Ubuntu forums, I got jealous and asked if we could have something similar for the wikis.
Aaron kindly and rapidly developed the wiki archive viewer in response. It’s still a work-in-progress, but already works great if you want to find your favorites from the old wiki:
ubuntu-community-team.github.io/ubuntu-wiki-archives-viewer
You can search based on the title of the page or the original URL and you can copy the source in MediaWiki format for easy migration to the new wiki.
Content
We want the wiki to be an open space for new and exciting content that grows through contributions from across the Ubuntu community.
In the period that the wiki was not publicly available, we did our best to seed it with examples of content that we think works well on the wiki.
Pages that have been added during that development phase include:
- A guide for installing flatpaks (thank you @marek-suchanek )
- Tips for playing DVDs on Ubuntu (thanks again @marek-suchanek )
- Ubuntu Server for the s390x architecture (thanks @Frank)
- Guides on game development on Ubuntu (that was me…)
Several early pages were contributed through the Open Documentation Academy, including:
- Ubuntu platform reference (thanks @davidekete)
- Ubuntu desktop components (thanks @network-charles)
- Audio on Ubuntu explanation (thanks @davidekete and @eeickmeyer)
If you want to improve any of the pages on the wiki, create new pages, or migrate old pages, then you can get started now.
If you’re interested in how content on the wiki and in our documentation might be different, I tried to articulate my understanding of this difference in a previous post.
Launch
We expect to have the new wiki launched some time in August/September.
Before launch, I will post another blog about some features that are planned but that may not be available at launch.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to @kkuo, who has done amazing work across the board in getting the project to this point, especially on the deployment and configuration of the wiki. Thanks also to @nickbellol, @matt-hagemann, and @weii-wang for their timely interventions when helping with the deployment effort. Thank you to @aaronprisk and @ilvipero for advocating for the community throughout the process and the Communications council for welcoming us to their meetings and collaborating with us on the governance policy. Thanks to Isaac-Kim and @juanruitina for expert Design input, @ashtonn for a large number of fixes to the theme, @degville and @avgomes for discussions on information architecture, @rkratky and @sally-makin for reviewing early drafts of the governance model, and @jibel and @danieleprocida for supporting the project and making sure we had the necessary resources. Thanks to the various Canonical teams who are getting us closer and closer to launch, especially IS, Platform Engineering, and the Documentation team. Lastly, thanks to the early testers and contributors, especially members of the Support team and the Open Documentation Academy. Sorry if I missed anyone 
but it’s time for me to sign off and take some Summer holidays.