Improving Ubuntu Help/Docs part 1 of 3

[David Tangye]

Hi all,

Last week I returned to PC and Ubuntu-land as I installed it onto a
second PC at my kids place. The PC is networked and needs to send print
to a Windows PC. I needed info on how to do this. So I spent a day
reading the help, the wiki.ubuntu.com, and some of help.ubuntu.com to
find out how. What I found was not very impressive. In fact a LOT of
what I found I thought was VERY amateur. "What a poor advertisement for
Ubuntu. Microsoft need never have to worry about Linux if this is the
best that the top distro can produce." I thought. So looked further. I
downloaded and read some Ubuntu list archives going back to about 12
months. Mainly from snippets here and there, I got an idea that the CUPS
config was set up wrong and that no update of the CUPS package had ever
fixed it. Great, so thousands of people all over the planet are
installing Ubuntu, finding they cant print anything unless they connect
a printer up to that machine, shake their heads sadly and move back to
Windows. There they just print to any printer on the network.

(Over 20 years ago, IBM stuffed up in a similar way. They produced an
excellent OS, called OS/2. It was vastly better than Windows, and of
course Microsoft, being involved, learnt a LOT about how to build
multitasking kernels from it, and later went on to produce NT/2000/XP.
Where did IBM lose? They did not provide networking (TCP/IP) with OS2 in
their package, whereas M$ bundled it into Windows (version 3.5). So most
people with OS/2 could not connect anywhere, unless they paid another
$450 then for TCP!! Result : nearly everyone eventually went to Windows
in their office, mainly 1.) so they could share printers, then 2.) to
email, and to share files. Sharing a printer was then and still is one
of the most important things people want from a PC. These days it is
even important in the home, as many homes have multiple PCs and people
do not want the expense of maintaining (ink for) multiple printers.)

("Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Who said
that - Winston Churchill?) And oh dear, you guys are repeating mistakes
I have seen dozens of times in the past. New technology, same old human
brain.

I worked out how to print over a network, and so I have written
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkPrintingWithUbuntu and redirected
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkPrintingFromUbuntu to it.

Anyway, having read and analysed so much info, and the pages and
messages about contributing, I have decided to write a brief list of
what you need to do, in the next message. Its intentionally going here
and not on a page such as https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BetterWikiDocs for
reasons that will be apparent in the next parts in following messages.
This is moe than enough for you to digest for now.

Part 2: Quality and why you wont get this stuff right unless you
understand and adhere to the formal concepts of "Quality". I hope to
make that part shorter than this one.

Part 3: The specifics: This message is going to be extremely concise. If
you take on board the above 2 you will see why.

Now, time for breakfast and then on to part 2. In the meantime, your
homework: If I say that there are "four plus one" cornerstones of
Quality, what is the single most important fundamental one. The answer
should tell you where your wiki and documentation are going wrong. Two
and arguably three of the other four you are mostly following quite
well.