Philipp Höhn

At the last Full Circle Magazine meeting I got to know about a plan to copy How To-articles from the fcm to the help.ubuntu.com wiki. I thought this was a good idea although I was surprised of the authors kindly offering their work to others. Even if fcm is an open source-related magazine, I didn’t expect every single author to totally agree to this idea. But hey, that’s a good surprise! Or perhaps I was just too pessimistic about that? Well, doesn’t matter, I guess. In fact, I volunteered for doing this fun-job and now I’m copying the fcm-How To-articles to the wiki. I logged in at the wiki website and started moving/creating/adapting a first article which is, by the way, part of Issue #3 of the Full Circle Magazine which I enjoyed reading enormously. Looking through this community created wiki I began to be surprised about how big it obviously has become. It must have been a long time since I’ve been to this website and I remember having been quite disappointed about it. Back then it was really small. I came there through the Ubuntu website looking for a solution to a Ubuntu-related problem. I thought following a way recommended by the official website of my operating system couldn”t be worse than to google for it (does the word googleing exist?). But I really didn”t find anything there that could help me which wasn’t really a surprise. I already thought it was pretty hard for a community created wiki to accomplish a solution-guide to everyone’’s problems. As you can guess, I found the solution I was looking for in a forum. But, to come back to what is now, this wiki really has grown. I browsed it just to check whether an article similar to the one I was going to “create”/copy & paste already existed and I must admit: I am impressed!

Editing the article to fit into the wiki I had to ask some simple questions, just to make sure I was doing the right thing. And, again, I was surprised. Everyone is friendly around there. Of course, we all know of the unbelievable friendliness of Ubuntu-related forums (German forums don”t count here ) but being able to ask somehow dumb questions isn”t something I expected to be so greatly appreciated. What more can a community based project have than good content, progress and friendly and obviously motivated members! Wow, good job!

But let’s stop felicitating them and give some details: From the index page you can access the different categories squarely listed. They have some basic how tos like software management meaning instructions on how to install, remove and update different pieces of software, the essential from-windows-to-linux-guide and more advanced themes like guides on viewing and editing photos, setting up servers, etc.. Something special is the Laptop Testing Team. They test different versions of Ubuntu on their laptops and analyse how good these things work under linux and what you can do to outwit some major problems. That reminded me of something. A few days ago I started writing about how to set up and configure Ubuntu on my Asus W2JC Laptop. I might continue that and contribute it to the wiki. Well, if it’’s good enough, of course.\r\n\r\nSo, to sum things up, if you’re interested in a growing, community based Ubuntu wiki you really should have a look at the website mentioned above and seriously think about contributing. I will.

Tags: internet, thoughts, Ubuntu