What to use in place of Fedora Wiki when making a community-editable document/reference?

Ask Fedora
,
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I’m interested in creating a community-edit-able document to document:

How to quickly learn Fedora Server as an experienced Ubuntu-Server sysadmin?

…but first I’m seeking feedback on:

Reddit: What to use in place of Fedora Wiki when making a community-editable document/reference?

Thoughts?

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Use whatever works for you really—the topic here, reddit, your blog, a GitHub repository.

Ideally, we want people contributing to the documentation once the information is relatively stable:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org

Your reddit post says you’ve had trouble with things like subscribing to a mailing list? Can you please open specific topics for the issues you’ve run into so folks can help?

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Thanks Ankur.

1. docs.fedoraproject.org user-contribution process: documented?

Is there a documented process for users like me contributing to the above Fedora Docs collection (of documents)? I do not have an immediate need, but it would make sense to have a documented process for this, yes?

Without the above:

a. There seems to be a different kind of problem with elmininating the Fedora Wiki: you get little or no user-documentation content submitted. My topic above might be a small case study of a good example for missed oppty for user-contributed docs; ie, “training an experienced Ubuntu-Server sysadmin to spinup quickly on Fedora Server” seems like an obviously-valuable document that’s currently underserved.

b. [an aside] Granted, my experience is that Wiki’s without rigorous document/content-management process and structure (I’ve managed some of these whose lifetime spanned many years) tend to devolve into much-less-useful resources over time, and it makes sense to me that Fedora Wiki was shut down.

c. User-developed content now lives in un-discoverable, un-structured, and/or un-indexed places (this forum and reddit are probably the most-popular spots… and Q+A threads are not my definition of “nicely-structred and efficiently-presented docs”).

This is almost assuredly not the first time the Fedora community leaders considered this (when they took down the Wiki). Where is the output/conclusion/documented_direction_from_leaders that resulted from that discussion? Specifically: what if any process exists for community input to docs dot fedoraproject dot org? ie, how does the community best fill the “hole” from no Wiki server? Maybe it’s there and we (my team) simply overlooked it.

(I apologize for the “dot” URL lingo; I’m a new user and this forum site keeps dinging me for adding website references to my post.)

For a community like Fedora that seems to be big into “self help” this feels a bit problematic and misaligned with the community’s charter.

Maybe I’m mis-understanding something?

2. past (4+ years ago) account-creation/sign-on/email-list-subscription problems

The troubles with fedora-community/sights account creation, mailing-list subscription, and related things:

  1. this happened more than 4 years ago. hard to remember exact specifics.
  2. problematic, from what I vaguely recall:
  • email-address verfication
  • password creation (the account-management engine may not have been real-time updating the passwords/authentication)
  • new/change account credentials were not recognized across multiple Fedora website/communities, even though they were clearly supposed to be.
  • it took me multiple hours, possibly days to get signed up to an email list. (I’ve subscribed to hundreds of email lists over the years. I have my own email domains. And yes, I know how to manage spam filters.)
  • eventually I gave up and (maybe?) started making multiple fedora accounts (with different email addresses) to get the job/tasks done.

It was a big, big mess. But it was so long ago and my memory so hazy (I did not keep any specific notes) that the info is probably no longer useful or pertinent.

The account-update procedure I went through yesterday was much better. Details:

I updated my password from a fedoraproject.com account I had stored in a password-vault system entry created 1.5 yrs ago and that seemed to work fine. I logged into this forums’ site (ask dot fedoraproject dot org), and while it took many seconds for the login to initially work (there was clearly some sort of background process initializing my first login… or something?), it all worked. I was relieved. :slight_smile:

The login-page quirk of combining the password and 2FA/one-time-password code/text into the same text entry field? It’s quite error prone and I’ve never seen that before. Certainly not an optimal thing, but alas, I suspect someone’s trying to make lemonade from lemons given a limited toolset (from whatever the tool-forum software is; it feels “Discourse”-y). Regardless, it works (for my login here, at least), and that’s a good thing.

If I have continued login or related “common account” problems later, I’ll start another thread here (at ask dot fedoraproject dot org).

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That means it is awaiting moderator approval and it will be posted once someone reviews.

Generally that happens when the system flags it for some reason. Usually when a new user copy/pastes it from somewhere else(Like translation software) and the system thinks it is a spammer or when the post includes many links.

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4+ hours later and I do not see any moderator approval nor feedback about my post.

  1. What’s a typical moderator-post-review response time?
  2. What’s a worst-case time window?
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The post was automatically flagged as spam. Please be patient. We are volunteers here, and personally I was in bed sleeping :sweat_smile:

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Please do not misinterpret my post. I was not complaining, I was just asking questions (in this case: about typical moderator turn-around time). We certaintly have no interest to cause strife, make people miss sleep, or anything silly like that. (Seriously.)

All volunteer and any contributions are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Our team’s posts will be more proactively appreciative in the future. We certainly do not want to send signals, even unintentionally, that we are not greatful. Quite the opposite. If anyone was offended by my questions, I sincerely apologize. If any further ammends need be made, please do not hesitate to DM me and I will do my best to work anything out.

In any case, my team is all good and looking forward to working with the Fedora community.

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Yes, there is.

Usually, such information fits well in the Quick Docs “sub-site”:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/

and you’ll see that the first link in the left hand bar is “Contribute to quick docs”.

The general contribution guidelines for all docs is here:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-docs/contributing/

Different sub-sites may be owned by different teams, and they may have their own contribution path, but I’ve not seen anyone use anything other than the standard pull request/merge request system yet.

The wiki is a scratch-pad, it is not documentation, and it is not kept up to date. It’s good to use it to make notes, but once these notes are stable enough to not change frequently, they should be moved to the appropriate location in the documentation.

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Yeh, that’s because we’ve recently moved to a new account system and front-end which enabled 2FA. This remains under heavy development. You can see the progress here:

https://github.com/fedora-infra/noggin/issues

The login page you see, our Open ID instance, has probably not yet been updated to include a different field for the 2FA token/context. (I’m sure the infrastructure team is aware of this, but I couldn’t find a ticket about it.)

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Eureka! Thanks Ankur for sharing the following, it’s just what we were seeking:

Question: can Fedora community reference the above “near the top or front” of places like the Fedora Wiki, ask to fedoraproject dot org, etc. The goal: when someone control-F-searches for “contribut” (for various forms of “contribute” / “contributing” / etc) they can find this wonderful goodness sooner. I’ll ask the Fedora subreddit to the the same. Seems useful to build community habits around employing the excellent (for us, anyway) document-creation paradigm you have going (more on this below)? I was initially looking and never found; I posted 2 significant discussion threads and eventually found the answer. Reducing that discovery barrier seems useful, but just my opinion.

More comments (all are FYIs save for the “branched” noggin question in comment #3 below):

1. The community-docs characterization looks fantastic (for my team).

Excerpt from:

Contribute to Quick Docs
The goal: move away from exposing users to the wild territory of wikis (where helpful guides are mixed with draft documentation, user pages, rough notes, and so on) to a nice, topic-oriented format with a pull-request-based workflow. We appeciate your help!

We love the above blurb and completely agree. We might even steal the above paragraph for internal usage. :slight_smile:

Side note: “appeciate” above is mispelled… we might try to update it with a pull request later a nice little test of this workflow. (Maybe somebody misspelled it on purpose, for this reason? :wink: )

2. great tools: FreeIPA, Asciidoc(tor), Antora, noggin

We love that the Fedora community is employing these tools, because we do, too–all except noggin, but we’re interested, see below. (Side note: FreeIPA-supporting Fedora is the initial reason why we’re spinning up a Fedora Server.) Antora is new to us, but has been on our wish list for some time. We’ve found these to be “best of breed” (to what little research we’ve done) to support free-er, digital-collaboration systems.

3. noggin: FreeIPA user-self-service portal

Exciting stuff. Discussion branched to here:

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As promised:

My initial /r/Fedora request to its leader(s) to create a toplevel pointer to on the /r/Fedora subreddit main page to a reference potentially labeled something like “Contribute to Docs”.