Announcing the launch of the new Ubuntu wiki
The new Ubuntu wiki is now deployed, in production, and ready to use at wiki.ubuntu.com. You will find that it offers a modern editing experience and a lot of built-in functionality.
In this post, I’ll explain what’s changing during the launch and revisit some background for the wiki project. Finally, I provide updates on new features that have landed since my last update.
Previous posts in the Ubuntu wiki project series
If you are interested in the planning and development of the new wiki, you can read the older posts linked below.
What is changing
The project to deprecate the two old MoinMoin wikis and transition to one new wiki, based on Mediawiki, was announced to the Ubuntu community seven months ago. Now that the new wiki has launched, there will be some changes to what you find at wiki.ubuntu.com and how you can edit wiki pages.
The new wiki can be accessed at wiki.ubuntu.com
For several weeks, the new Ubuntu wiki has been available at wiki.staging.ubuntu.com.
It has now been moved to wiki.ubuntu.com, the URL of the old wiki. The staging URL currently doesn’t work, but will eventually become a place for us to develop new features and test bug fixes.
In the coming days, we will also be setting up redirects from the other wiki at help.ubuntu.com/community to the new wiki.
You may not find old or bookmarked wiki pages
From today, if you try to access a page on the old wiki, you will instead reach the new wiki. The page may or may not be discoverable, depending on whether you or someone else has migrated it.
If the page doesn’t exist you will be shown links to:
- Search results for the page title on the new wiki
- Search results for the page in the GitHub archives
- A new page that you can create with that page title
The plaintext version of the archive on GitHub is quick and easy to search. The files have been cleansed of spam and converted to MediaWiki syntax for easier migration. The plaintext archive contains the latest versions of pages that existed in both old wikis prior to their deprecation.
Much larger tarball archives, containing files in the original Moinmoin syntax, in addition to images, attachments, and page histories, were also recovered. These were extracted and processed several months before launch to ensure we had the bulk of the material archived in time. These archives will be updated but it will take time to reprocess them.
Editing the new wiki
All you need is an Ubuntu One account
Anyone with an Ubuntu One account can edit any page on the wiki, except for a small number of pages — most notably the homepage — which are protected.
In the old wiki, prospective editors had to apply to become a member of a wiki editors group on Launchpad. Their application then underwent a human review. This was difficult for the reviewer, who had to determine if a person (who they usually didn’t know) was trustworthy. It could also be time-consuming, potentially delaying edit access to legitimate editors.
Becoming an editor of the new wiki is a simpler and faster process.
Earning trust grants additional privileges
To create new pages and edit protected pages, you need to have made 10 edits, with the first edit being 4 days old.
This mechanism helps ensure that new contributors earn trust as editors before they are able to do potentially dangerous actions.
You will receive a notification when you make your 10th edit. In addition, you can check how many edits you have at any time on your Special:Preferences page, which also allows you to customize your wiki experience.
Making these initial few edits is also an effective way of learning how to use the wiki.
Multiple editing modes
When editing, you can use a visual editor or a source editor, and switch between them whenever needed.
The visual editor is WYSIWYG and similar to LibreOffice Writer, Google docs or Word. It comes with a range of conveniences, including input dialogs and slash commands.
The source editor is similarly featureful, and includes syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, linting, multiple cursors, and more.
Overall, the editing experience is a significant improvement compared to the old wikis.
Old wiki content remains accessible
We have made a public, read-only archive of the two old wikis, available in three formats:
- A text-only archive: available on GitHub, this is easy and fast to search. Sources have been converted to MediaWiki syntax for easier migration.
- A tarball archive: available as a GitHub release artifact. Two large archives that contain additional data, including images, attachments, and article histories.
- An archive viewer: convenient web-based interface for finding and viewing old pages that can be run locally or online.
We made the deliberate decision to not bulk migrate tens of thousands of old wiki pages, many of which are outdated and/or duplicate information found elsewhere. Over the course of its 20+ years, the wiki accumulated a lot of material (including a non-trivial amount of spam), not all of which justifies the cost of a migration and the associated maintenance burden.
This is an opportunity to reboot the wiki with new content that is interesting to a broad range of people in the Ubuntu community. If we, as community members, think some pages on the old wiki are important, then we should migrate those pages, and use that as an opportunity to update and improve them.
The new wiki is small for now, but not empty
While the new wiki doesn’t have thousands of pages (yet), it does contain 50 or so pages on a range of interesting topics, including:
- Historical curiosities: No-name-yet
- Factual references: Ubuntu download sizes
- Developer guides: Ebitengine game engine
- Explanatory overviews: Containers
- Desktop tips: Nautilus scripts
- Installation guides: Install Flatpaks
- Hot topics: AI on Ubuntu
- Technical deep-dives: How WSL images are built
- Wiki tips: Using MCP with the Ubuntu wiki
- Weird, niche guides about remixing the Warty startup theme
These and other pages do not fit comfortably in Ubuntu’s official documentation, for various reasons, but could be interesting to some in the community.
The new wiki is small because it is new, but also because it will need to be more focused. The old wiki served many purposes, including the hosting of internal documentation, for example. The new wiki is specifically for pages of interest to the Ubuntu community and we should endeavor to keep it maintainable.
Features in the new wiki
The new wiki offers a wide range of user-facing enhancements compared to the old wikis. There are too many to list, and, as we’ve been using the wiki ourselves, we keep discovering new tricks.
Here are some highlights that you are likely to benefit from right away:
- Autosuggestions when you search for pages
- Autosuggestions when you type internal links
- Light, dark, and system themes
- Mobile-responsiveness
- Visual editing (WYSIWYG)
- Slash commands in the visual editor
- Visual input dialogs for adding templates, tables, categories, and more
- Syntax highlighting in the source editor
- Multi-cursor editing in the source editor
- Live-reloading preview when source editing
- Linting in the source editor
- Keyboard shortcuts for almost every common action
- Automated spam filters
- And much, much more…
Added since the last update
We have tried to get the wiki to the best state possible for launch, and there are a lot more improvements and features that we are planning for the future.
Image uploads
The wiki now supports image uploads, image galleries, and slideshows.
While we expect a lot of content on the wiki to be text-based, we also wanted to ensure that the wiki supported images, which can be helpful for guides on graphical interfaces, as just one example.
Lua scripting
We have added Lua scripting. A sandboxed version of the Lua interpreter runs in the wiki.
This is especially useful for making programmatic and dynamic templates. You can see a small example on this Lua page, where the diagram is generated from a Lua template, and a user can change the number of boxes and the labels when using the template.
Editing suggestions
Recent versions of MediaWiki have a new feature called EditCheck.
EditCheck works by displaying suggestions live while you are editing a page. This can help you identify common issues before you decide to Save changes….
Some checks are built-in. For example, if you paste a large block of text into a page, you are asked to check if it is your work and to rewrite anything if it is copied; of course, you can dismiss the suggestion if you disagree with it. Custom checks can also be created by administrators. In the example below, for example, there is a check for terms like “Ubuntu,” which should be capitalized in most contexts.
Motivation for the wiki project
This section revisits and summarizes comments made previously, for those who may not have read the blog series.
The role of the wiki
Over many years, the wiki became an important source of information about Ubuntu, thanks to sustained contributions from community members and volunteers.
Ubuntu is an extremely popular Linux distro with a large and diverse cohort of users. As a platform, wikis remain one of the most accessible ways to build and share knowledge through distributed collaboration across such a large community. We believe that having an excellent wiki is important for Ubuntu as a community project.
The new wiki aims to lower barriers to contributors. You do not need to be a developer to contribute. You don’t need to go through an application process. You don’t need to know Git. You don’t even need to know wikitext or markdown. If you can fix a typo, improve the accuracy of a page, or create a fun guide based on a personal hobby, then you are making a real contribution to Ubuntu.
At the same time, power users can find a home on the wiki. Detailed technical guides and references are welcome, as are efforts to help categorize and architect the information. The wiki is even scriptable with Lua, which unlocks a lot of interesting possibilities for technical contributors.
Just like the old wiki, we’ll need community members like you to make the new wiki a source of high-quality information that is appealing to an audience as wide as Ubuntu’s.
Problems with the old wikis
For several years, there have been two Ubuntu wikis. The one originally at wiki.ubuntu.com was launched around the first Ubuntu release in 2004, while the other at help.ubuntu.com/community came later.
The first problem is that there were two wikis. If you were looking for information, which one would you use? If you want to create a page, where would you add it??
Then there was the security issue. The wikis were built with a version of the MoinMoin wiki platform that was still on Python 2. So they no longer received important security patches.
While the content on the old wikis was vast, a lot of it was outdated and had not been maintained. There were pages that clashed with more up-to-date content in the official documentation. Some of the functions that the wikis used to serve — as internal documentation, as a host for membership applications, as a forum for team discussions — had been gradually migrated to other platforms, including Discourse.
Finally, the wikis have suffered from a range of usability issues. Their visual design had aged poorly. They were not mobile-friendly. The user experience when performing common actions — searching, editing, linking to other pages — was not inviting to new users. Following a link could lead to slow loading times, or — even worse — a crash.
Building for the future with 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, along with an eclectic mix of other lovely wikis that remain excellent places to get lost online (see Minecraft, Runescape, Valve developer wiki). Debian is in the process of a similar migration of their wiki from MoinMoin to MediaWiki.
Over the last few years, we have looked at these other projects for inspiration, but we also recognized that the Ubuntu wiki project has its own special challenges. For example, our wiki must co-exist fruitfully with the official Ubuntu documentation, and we see opportunities to develop that relationship. Some content that is difficult to maintain in the official docs is perfect for the wiki, such as third party integrations, alternatives to official recommendations, desktop customizations, and more. Our hope is that the wiki and the documentation will be stronger as a pair.
Ubuntu has a diverse user base. It is not only for technical users. Some users are highly technical and comfortable running terminal commands, while others are not. Ideally, the wiki should offer something of interest to everyone as readers, while making it equally welcoming and accessible for everyone as contributors.
Reporting bugs with the new wiki
You may find bugs or issues with the wiki when using it as a reader, editor, or administrator.
For now, please send reports to the Communications Council on the Ubuntu community Discourse, and the team maintaining the wiki will look into the problem.
There are two ways of sending a report. Make sure you are logged in, then either:
- Send a DM with
@comms-councilas the recipient, or - Go to discourse.ubuntu.com/g/comms-council and post a message.
Happy editing
From initial prototyping, to the staging deployment, to today’s launch, this has been a multi-year effort.
Thanks to everyone in Ubuntu community who has offered support and ideas, the Communications council for helping us navigate questions of governance, and the various Canonical teams for helping us get over the line.
Please try out the wiki, have fun, and tell us about your experience.
I look forward to using it alongside you and helping you make it the best Ubuntu wiki possible.
— Shane
Acknowledgements
Special thanks — again — to @kkuo, for the massive technical effort to get this launched, and also for reviewing an early version of this announcement.
