UbuntuWiki:UDSF

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The Ubuntu Document Storage Facility

UDSF and Doc team commentary - See the UbuntuWiki:/talk page

The History of the Facility

Written By UbuntuWiki:Kassetra

In February 2005, Ryan and Kassetra began talking about the fact that information on the forums was quickly getting buried under pages of new threads/posts. We discussed a way of preserving the forum knowledge base in a way that would be similar to the knowledge bases that customer services representatives (also known as Tier 1 support staff) use to answer customer issues.

As we were looking over how to automate the storing of only the solution to problems, it became clear that automating the "cleaning" of threads to an archival facility in order to keep the solutions from being buried would be a lot more work than either of us had time to devote.

Sometime in August/September we both realized that it was imperative that we find some way of archiving our information into a faster-access facility in order to keep posts from being buried alive due to the increased popularity.

We experimented with some additional plug-ins to the forum software and showed the results to our staff - who saw the wiki-based addition as an extremely important tool in the goal of trying to help all of our users; this way, a good tip, howto or solution wouldn't fly by at the speed of light as hundreds of new posts/threads pour in on top of it.

Within a few days, however, it became clear that the beta-level plug-in was not up to the task we had asked of it and I asked KingBahamut to setup a backup knowledgebase on his server, which he willingly did.

From that point forward, the forum knowledge base has rested on KingBahamut's server, providing a service that we simply didn't have time to do, as was his own choice. The people that populate the archive are doing exactly as we had imagined - archiving the information from the forums before it becomes lost to everyone.

Written By King Bahamut

The idea behind building the UDSF was to create an active place to archive pertinent data from the forums. It seemed fortuitous to do this at the time as much of the forum documentation was quite large and getting lost quite rapidly in the shuffle. Previous attempts at getting users to submit data to the Wiki itself were failing. Through appropriate sticky posts in the Customisation Forum there was a push for users to submit their data, and it wasn't happening. There appeared to be difficulties with submitting the data in the proper form. Whether this was a result of the useability of the official wiki itself and its moin moin markup, something expressed more than once by a variety of individuals, or it was just general user laziness...it seemed more effective to comb the forums for the data, using the forum teams like Team Bahamut, and collect it in a single point.

The result however turned out to be much larger than that. As the UDSF started to grow it became more and more popular with users. There was a disagreement at this point about what the UDSF was about. The UDSF started as a knowledge base of archived forum tips, howtos, solutions, and general information - and currently remains a central piece of the forum data flow; storing the information that is presented in the numerous threads before it disappears under hundreds of new posts.

When the issue regarding licensing of the information contained in the UDSF arose, I changed the license on the UDSF to a -C C:PD-, informed my teams of this, and informed those others involved. In its current form, if such a license agrees with with wiki itself, the official documentation could then happily move onward to the Official wiki itself.

So what is the Ubuntu Document Storage Facility about?

Describing what the UDSF is about is much easier if you understand the norms of the forum community itself. Given that requirement, I will start off by explaining forum norms with a common scenario.

A user named XYZ has just installed Ubuntu and everything seemed to be going fine but then the system told him that his X server wouldn't start and printed out a bunch of odd characters on the screen and it's asking him if he wants to see the error log. He switches to his other computer and creates an account on the forums and posts a question asking about what the error means. He gets a response and it fixes the X server problem, but now he can't login with the user account he just created, so he makes another post in the same thread explaining his problem. He gets a response to his second issue and he's fine.

A month later, user XYZ is installing Ubuntu on his other computer and has the same issue again - he goes back to the forums to find the solution, because that's where he got it the first time... but now, that thread is buried under hundreds of threads, thousands of posts, and even a search brings up fifty results... so he simply asks his question again, in a new post, in a new thread... adding to the posts burying his original thread.

If the information had been archived, cleanly, on the UDSF - the user would not have been frustrated by trying to find the post, and then wouldn't have made the second thread as well. The second benefit of archiving the information would be that even if the user made the second thread - another user could simply point him to the solution archived on the UDSF from his prior thread.

So in explaining what the UDSF is about - it's about giving the forum users another tool to find information that existed in the forums, similar to the forum search tool. This tool, however, isn't automated, so the results are much clearer to understand and easier to find the right item.

The Focus and Purpose of UDSF

In general, the UDSF is a centralized archival repository for information that is produced on the forums: a public forum library, a knowledge base. An effort to record and maintain the forum community-based documents that have a tendency to get lost in the lightning-fast pace of the vibrant participation, the UDSF seeks to replicate the organization of the most frequently accessed areas of the forums, and optimize the already-familiar information architecture with a well-developed dynamic hierarchy and content chunks.

The UDSF strives to be a dynamic, well-organized knowledge base, decreasing the amount of time a user spends trying to find information that was previously posted/discussed on the forum. The UDSF also serves as a self-service forum library; as a rule, this capacity should make the interaction simpler for both, the forum users and the forum staff.

UDSF volunteers are archivists and knowledge base editors. The teams of people volunteering perform information collection, organization, and content retrieval from the forum, but are not, broadly speaking, writing the documents. UDSF volunteers are not doc writers and would be more aptly described as organizers/maintainers/archivists of Forum data.

The Future of The UDSF

As emerging technologies are quickly exemplifying, people are more comfortable with the idea that once they search for something, they can save that search and quickly go back to the results produced. This is the future of the UDSF; a beagle-like tool for archived information from the Forums. In the future, if user XYZ posts a screenshot of her desktop and other users ask how she did it, she will be able to give those users a "saved search," if you will, of the archived tips, howtos, and solutions from the forums that showed her how to make her desktop look like it does. This same principle applies to creating a saved search for how to setup a dual-headed monitor with the latest nvidia drivers and the newest cedega release, and other things that users do with their systems and then post to the forums about, or want to know about.

In perspective, the UDSF is an archival tool that quickly stores information from the forums that would otherwise be lost, but it has the opportunity to become a natural extension to the automated search tool available on the forums currently.

Integration with the Ubuntu Wiki

The UDSF gives forum users a clean archive, in a similar environment as the forums itself. Favorite howtos are never lost; they are available without the weight of hundreds of thousands of posts pushing them away.

The UDSF does something more though, as users locate their saved information in the archive, popular solutions will get updated and fixed as people post on the forums about their favorite sets of howtos. The UDSF will be able to distill the good tips, howtos, and solutions out of the thousands of threads - and only the popular ones, the good ones, survive. The UDSF will serve as a user-oriented cleaning process for information that comes from the forums.

The UDSF is a human-filtered archive of the forums that serves to polish the jewels and remove the rough, making sure that only the best of the best get copied over to the Ubuntu Wiki from the forums.