Documentation reliability

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 08:47:58PM -0000, Matthew East wrote:
> The real question here is how to portray which documentation is reliable,
> and which is less reliable. There is a serious misuse of the word
> "official" which is giving rise to this confusion right now. Both the
> "official" documents and "non-official" wiki documents are contributed to
> by community volunteers, rather than professionals (there is *no*
> documentation right now that Canonical rubber-stamps). The simple fact is
> that the "official" documentation isn't in fact necessarily more reliable
> than some of the more carefully attended wiki pages. On the other hand,
> there are other wiki pages that are not necessarily very reliable, and
> others that are downright unreliable.

I see no reason why community-contributed documentation should not be
considered "official", if it has been reviewed and vetted by appropriate
parties.  Remember, most of the software in Ubuntu is produced by community
volunteers, rather than professionals.

The question at hand is simply how to arrange that review process so that
documents can be officially blessed.

> The challenge here is to create a system which makes what the users get to
> see represent this reality. The answer isn't to make users look on two
> different websites for a non-existent division between official and
> non-official documentation, but rather to establish a system where users
> can access all material in the same website (which of course has immense
> benefits in terms of searching and navigability), but to establish a good
> quality assurance system which (a) is easy for community members to
> contribute to and add their experience, and (b) communicates well to the
> user exactly how reliable a page is.
> 
> If you've got some ideas about this for online documentation, please check
> out this spec: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpWikiQualityAssurance (we could
> probably use some coding help with it too).

Agreed.  Every documentation page should have an appropriate header which
explains its status.  You can talk with Matthew Nuzum (webmaster, CCed)
regarding the technical details.

-- 
 - mdz