Completely agree. I’m grasping for ways to reduce the complexity, and seems like @5g3-steven-7tv has suggested one, so I’ll throw this sketch out into the middle of the room. I’m not married to this, and I can see many of the same holes in it that you will. It’s an attempt to match the classes of documentation to the current activity in that class.
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Tutorials/Initial: I see a lot of monetized YouTube videos “How to install Ubuntu” and “How to install a scanner” in addition to the tutorials on tutorials.ubuntu.com. I wonder if we can offer guidance to some of those video-makers to fill gaps - that might be a bite-sized volunteer task.
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How To/Checklist: I see a lot of these on 1) tutorials.ubuntu.com (sometimes mis-labeled “tutorials”) and 2) AskUbuntu, in addition to the fabulous 3) Desktop Guide and 4) Server Guide. I wonder if we can break down some of those silos.
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Discussion/Explanation: This used to be where the wiki stood out. A lot of this moved to developer blog posts. I wonder if we can draw many of those posts to Discourse’s wiki/threaded format, where volunteers can tickle the thread owners for an update-and re-post on a schedule.
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Reference: Much of what I see has moved to reference-specific platforms like readthedocs. If developers are happy with it there, then I don’t see a need to re-invent it.
My initial takeaway using this framework is that there is action in each class. Some of that action seems to be taking place outside of the Canonical or Ubuntu infrastructure. There seems to be some low-hanging opportunities within reach, and there are a few seemingly-intractable knots. It’s possible that wiki’s bitrot might be terribly embarrassing…but no worse than that.
I’m quite open to other ways of breaking the problem into more digestible pieces.