Should we bring back wiki.jenkins.io?

[Olblak]

Hi Everybody, 

During the last Infrastructure meeting, Daniel Beck came with an interesting question.

Considering the proliferation of Google documents and other random tools to take notes,

shouldn't we consider bringing back Confluence?

While I am not convinced that a wiki is THE solution, I definitely share his frustration.

I feel we did a major step backward in terms of knowledge management across the Jenkins project.

 

Nowadays, the default behavior is to create a Google document to take notes during meetings or event organizations.

This approach is very easy for synchronous collaboration but it also has bad side effects. It's difficult to find old documents unless you bookmarked them. And, documents lifecycle are affected by the "new" google storage policy or corporate google accounts.

    

Historically, we used the wiki to take notes and write documentation. https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS

That central place was really convenient to share and find information across community initiatives.

That being said, I didn't forget the reasons to move away from Confluence, and here are some of them:

    

1. Spammers, because of the nature of the Jenkins project we tend to attract a lot of spammers. Then *someone* has to do some clean-up.

2. Maintaining confluence is a major distraction that nobody wants to do. 

3. Confluence in the current state is very slow mainly due to point 2 and due to unfinished infrastructure work.

The two last elements could be solved by asking the Linux Foundation to maintain Confluence. The same way they do for Jira

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that Atlassian is deprecating their on-prem solution in 2024.

    

Several weeks ago, I started an experiment on the infrastructure project to use hackmd.io to allow synchronous collaboration on meeting notes.

During a meeting or a maintenance window, everybody can participate then at the end of the meeting someone pushes the notes to a git repository like https://github.com/jenkins-infra/documentation/#documentation

To me it combines two approaches, it's as easy as a Google document to collect notes and then we can easily store them on a git repository directly in Markdown.

Unfortunately, I am not convinced by the asynchronous collaboration workflow.

There is a demo here - https://youtu.be/1s2Y3aPXTOI?t=126 (Sorry for the poor video)

As I said it's an experiment, the purpose is to simplify synchronous collaboration and then persist the content on a git repository that can easily be browsed.

I would be curious to know your feeling about all of this and if you have other suggestions.

    

Cheers

[Tim Jacomb]

Please no, wiki's suck for quality documentation.

Anyone can put whatever rubbish they want there.

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[Oleg Nenashev]

I am -1 for recovering Wiki as it was. -0 if we are talking about creating a new Wiki from scratch on Atlassian Cloud, just for Jenkins GitHub organization members. No Jenkins LDAP would be needed there if we chose such a way.

IMHO Wiki can be largely replaced by Documentation-as-Code in repositories, hackmd, and, if needed, on GitHub Wiki pages.SIGs could move the moist of the contents there. Same for the Governance meeting, we could move to HackMd easily. Advanced forums like Discourse could also help to store particular pieces of content one would put on Wiki

I think that Google Docs are quite fine, and I am definitely responsible for dozens of Google Docs we have in the community. Indeed it is nearly impossible to find something due to many different accounts being used. Maybe having a sponsored GSuite account or Switching to OwnCloud could be an option if we want to centralize the location of the documents.

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[Liam Newman]

Please no, wiki's suck for quality documentation.

+1000   

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[Daniel Beck]

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 3:57 PM Tim Jacomb <timja...@gmail.com> wrote:

Please no, wiki's suck for quality documentation.

It would not be intended for "quality documentation". That belongs on the site (plugins.j.io via GH readmes, or jenkins.io otherwise). It would be for meeting notes, perhaps project proposals for GSOC, etc. -- content like that. Frequently updated, often short lived content, that's only looked at seldom in the future.

Hence my suggestion to start over with a clean slate, recovering none of the old content. There's just too much in there that should not be in a wiki.

[Olblak]

I am -1 for recovering Wiki as it was. -0 if we are talking about creating a new Wiki from scratch on Atlassian Cloud, just for Jenkins GitHub organization members. No Jenkins LDAP would be needed there if we chose such a way.

-1 for Atlassian Cloud. To me, it's still not an option unless we ask contributors to create an Atlassian account.

https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/configure-saml-single-sign-on-with-an-identity-provider/

I think that Google Docs are quite fine, and I am definitely responsible for dozens of Google Docs we have in the community.

To me, they are throw away documentation. Ideally, I would like to easily find old information especially when we organize events like Fosdem or to review past contributor summit notes.

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[Oleg Nenashev]

Ideally, I would like to easily find old information especially when we organize events like Fosdem or to review past contributor summit notes.

any plans w.r.t. updating https://www.jenkins.io/events/fosdem/ then? :)

 

[Daniel Beck]

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 6:01 PM Daniel Beck <db...@cloudbees.com> wrote:

It would be for meeting notes

As an example, I remember a contributor summit (FOSDEM 2020?) at which a topic was discussed and nobody else was aware it was discussed a few years back because the notes were in some random Google doc long forgotten about and not easily recovered.

Not to mention the giant mess such a document becomes once there are multiple meeting tracks.

Project meeting, SIG meetings, contributor summit, other odds and ends – that's what this would be for.

 

perhaps project proposals for GSOC, etc.

To clarify, while ideas are being developed. At some point it probably should be moved to the site proper. (I may not be involved enough in this process though, so this may be a bad example.)

 

[Basil Crow]

On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 9:26 AM Daniel Beck <db...@cloudbees.com> wrote:
>
> As an example, I remember a contributor summit (FOSDEM 2020?) at which a topic was discussed and nobody else was aware it was discussed a few years back because the notes were in some random Google doc long forgotten about and not easily recovered.

As a former coworker of mine (a technical writer) used to say: "Google
Docs: where information goes to die."

[Tim Jacomb]

What do other communities do for meetings notes? I think k8s is google docs.

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