Gosh, hello. I don’t typically pop by but I’ve seen enough of people struggle to try to update the documentation as a means of trying to contribute in my short time of being here so I’ll chime in. For Rhys’ sanity, I guess I’m addressing:
By adding in a little more ‘data’ on how I suspect community documentations ended up rotting, and what we could do - even if it’s a some low hanging fruit of a solution - to fix this
I actually think there are many of these sort: I think that the biggest source of bite-sized or entry level documentation tasks come from people who happen to’ve used a wiki link, and realized from their interactions that there is an outdated error.
We’ve seen people bring up errors (if they even thought to make things known on a communication platform) via askUbuntu, this discourse (myself included one time) - but most effectively the ubuntu-docs mailing list
The problem isn’t necessarily knowing what needs to be changed in itself: Their main challenge is to figure out how to edit the documentation. Which results in them having to wrangle not only the outdated user interface of Launchpad, but to gather some courage to try to join the Wiki Editors team. When I first installed Linux on my new laptop, having primarily had a background straight out of uni in closed-source, make-a-profitable-product-first,-sod-the-other-priorities, this was a really draining process - even if it wasn’t the most technically challenging. It rightfully signalled that trying to contribute to Ubuntu is currently an uphill battle for newcomers, and I should wait till I had absorbed a little more quietly.
While this might be true, I think that people who’ve contacted the ubuntu-docs mailing list had the right idea at the best place to get an documentation error known and fixed. I’m not sure if there is a need for someone to be wholly in charge, just that people who didn’t have access to fix the docs know that they could let someone know who can. Documentation fixes are on the whole, just requiring small changes here and there - the recent need to replace all freenode links to libera being a good example of that. Something like the ubuntu-wiki could be managed as a ‘whole’ mailing list at the moment.
So I had a really simple suggestion to solve this: Could we just have a little, fairly visible sign on the Ubuntu-Wiki that people with amendments should either feel free to apply to join the Wiki Editors group - or to direct them to the mailing list (or potentially even the discourse) to let someone know to edit it?
I think that if we try to solve these little problems from the perspective of a new user, it would start to highlight what needs to be prioritized first. Ubuntu is a highly visible open source product after all, I’m sure many have thought of contributing but got overwhelmed with quite what this all entails in 2021