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When answering a question here on Ask Ubuntu I sometimes would like to link to a wiki page explaining some topic in more detail, say, the ALSA sound system.

For German speaking users there's the very useful wiki.ubuntuusers.de, but what about an English equivalent? wiki.ubuntu.com comes to mind, but it doesn't even have a page for ALSA, or .profile, or Dolphin, or KDE – you can't be serious!

When looking for information just for myself, I often end up using the excellent Arch Linux wiki, but of course it's weird to link to the Arch Linux wiki to explain Ubuntu stuff.

What did I miss?

muru
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dessert
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    The current set up of the wiki is a significant contributing factor. Due to a concerted spam attack awhile back, in order to edit either of the wikis, you need to be a member of the ubuntu-wiki-editors team on launchpad. When I went to join, there were 57 people who had requested to join already. When I brought this up, the attitude seemed to be "Well they didn't try hard enough to get approved" which kind of dumbfounds me. It took me a mail to the team and pinging the lead via an Ubuntu Member to get myself approved. – drkokandy Aug 23 '17 at 17:10

1 Answers1

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Unfortunately your observation that the https://wiki.ubuntu.com page is not nearly complete and often outdated is correct. Some pages there are useful, but more often you will be rather disappointed than satisfied.

There is also the official documentation on https://help.ubuntu.com/ though. You can link to pages of its HTML version.

More info about the differences between the Ubuntu Wiki, Community Wiki and Ubuntu Help pages can be found at What is the difference between the *.ubuntu.com wikis?

The Arch Wiki is amazing in its size and detail, and quite often there is few or no difference between Arch and Ubuntu (except mainly package management stuff, etc), so linking an Arch Wiki article can be perfectly fine. Just make sure you verify that the important parts are valid for both systems before posting.

Other than that, popular posts here on Ask Ubuntu (searching for keywords and sorting the results by vote score or a site-search on e.g. Duck Duck Go or Google will help you to find appropriate posts) or e.g. https://ubuntuforums.org can also serve as valuable reference.

Sometimes actually even Wikipedia does the job.

Byte Commander
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    The ubuntu wiki is only as current & detailed as we all make it. Where its out of date; it's because we (the community) aren't updating it, and if something isn't there; again its because we haven't put it in the wiki. When I see something wrong, I make an effort to try and correct it on the wiki - maybe more of us should try :) – guiverc Aug 19 '17 at 13:22
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    @guiverc You are totally right and I agree with that, but apparently the community behind the Wiki is rather small and not very active. Probably this is a vicious circle as the current low quality scares potential contributors away, which keeps the quality low... IIRC its infrastructure also isn't the best and often causes long load times and other additional difficulties. Anyway, it would likely be relatively easy to maintain the wiki on a high quality level, but it's rather hard to get it there in the first place. – Byte Commander Aug 19 '17 at 13:27
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    @ByteCommander Thanks for your answer! I'm totally astonished that the German wiki is really better than the English one. Browsing https://wiki.ubuntu.com I also found the website to be very unintuitive. I think it would be worth it to start a totally new wiki page with one of the well established wiki engines. With a community as vivid as here it shouldn't be so hard to create a reliable wiki from the sources you mentioned – and maybe even translating foreign (in a double sense, e. g. German and ArchLinux) wiki pages. – dessert Aug 22 '17 at 06:31