What does our community need? (Magic wand time in MSE)

Question

Philippe, the Vice President of Community for the Stack Exchange Network, posted a question on Meta Stack Exchange seeking input from the community regarding "ONE thing" that would help one's community.

If you had a magic wand that you could wave that would let you fix ONE thing that would help your community (not the network, not the company, but the specific site community with which you most closely identify) overnight, what would you change (and why?), and what would the result look like - how would we know it was different?

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I request the Ask Ubuntu community members to share the one thing which you think would help our community. You can post your answer here and someone kind enough can repost it as an answer for Philippe's question on Meta Stack Exchange or you can directly post your answer in the aforementioned Meta Stack Exchange question.

Answer 1

I posted my answer there already. I will reproduce it here:

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Archive feature

On Ask Ubuntu we have a lot of questions, and especially a lot of answers, which were super relevant and useful to a lot of people at the time they were posted, but which no longer have value in helping folks find out how to do x, because how to do x has changed over time. Many such posts are highly upvoted, jump up on search engines, and if they are answers show at the top of the by-default-vote-ordered pile.

We don't delete such posts, and I don't think we should delete them or even necessarily edit them to update them (often this would involve replacing all of the content, perhaps making it the same as other existing answers to the same question), because they have a social history value and perhaps can be of use to people interested in user experience and various other aspects of software development - who knows? But the mass of obsolete material is only increasing over time and gradually making it harder for visitors and reviewers to find answers that actually give accurate and current information. It's not at all the case that everything old is out-of-date, but enough of our posts are out-of-date that it's an issue.

Recently Monica from the Ubuntu community team gave me the idea of an archive feature. The way I think it could work would be different for questions and answers.

For answers, 5 users could vote to archive an answer, and it would be pushed to the bottom of the page in all views under a notice that the below answers are archived and may not work any more.

For questions, 5 users could vote to archive a question, and a notice would appear at the top of it stating that it is archived and may no longer be relevant, and optionally and preferably, linking to newer questions with current answers on the same topic.

Answer 2

Better integration with other forms of Ubuntu documentation.

Many of the questions that we answer are already addressed in documentation.

But those answers are hard to find, hard to understand for some audiences, of varying quality, and spread among a dozen places I can think of.

So we wind up duplicating a bunch of it here. And then both the original location and the answer here slowly rot, both minimally-maintained and both hard to find.

I would use the magic wand to make the 10 minutes I spend writing an answer ALSO incrementally improve the existing documentation and make that improved documentation easier to find.

As a consequence, we would have better documentation that's updated (instead of languishing), more understandable by a wider audience, and every AskUbuntu answer becomes a more effective contribution to the Ubuntu community.

I realize that's a tall order, and I don't claim to fully see the path to get there from here. Good thing it's a magic wand.

Answer 3

Obsolete Answer Flag

In many cases the answer with the most upvotes is simply the one that has been here longest. Often these high vote answers are totally obsolete and no longer work.

It was much easier to get votes in the old days, when Ask Ubuntu was new and unique. Answers did not need to be very good to get lots of upvotes.

There should be an obsolete flag so that users can flag these old and obsolete answers to drop them from the top of the list. A flagged answer does not need to be totally removed, just dropped to the bottom of the page where it won't hurt anyone. It should probably take a vote of five flags to demote an answer.

Closing a duplicate question and then linking an old question with 20 obsolete answers wastes the users time and does not give users much confidence in Ask Ubuntu.

Some people talk about historical value of these answers but people come here to get help making their Ubuntu work, not history lessons.

Lets keep Ask Ubuntu relevant and up to date.

Answer 4

A move-to-chat button on demand

There are certain questions which will require some back and forth to arrive at a working solution. The current system only prompts you to move to chat after some 20 comments have been posted to the question.

It will be better if we can speed up this process and allow us to move to chat at the earliest.

Link to similar feature request on meta.Stack Exchange and my answer there nearly 10 years ago: Should "move-to-chat" be provided on demand (as a button perhaps)?

Answer 5

According to my personal experience, I have noticed a lot of questions on Ask Ubuntu which are related to non-Ubuntu Linux distributions.

It might be difficult to find these kinda questions and sometimes, some questions which are about non-Ubuntu Linux distributions don't get closed and they remain hidden in our site.

I have a suggestion which might help us tackle this problem. It would be nice if we can have a chat bot which will a send a message in a chatroom if it notices new posts which contain words like "Fedora", "Linux Mint", etc. containing the link of the post (something similar to what Natty does).

I do acknowledge that this is not a perfect solution as there are many posts which talk about shifting from one OS to another OS (like from Linux Mint to Ubuntu).

What's your opinion about my suggestion, people?

Answer 6

My goal is to archive Ubuntu articles that have no technical value in a current search for help for a Ubuntu/Linux Mint content, but are readily available in a historical context.

Archiving is already being done in a sophisticated way and while tagging is limited to the individual, it is something I would do if available.

The criteria to identify these en masse are available and known, and the process currently used by Internet Archive is slow. Speeding it up is only a matter of funding.

Answer 7

ESM

Questions about older versions of Ubuntu still covered by ESM should be on topic on Ask Ubuntu.

There may be many valid reasons a person still needs to use 14.04 or 16.04. Where else will they go to find an answer to there questions besides AU?

If Canonical can continue support of these versions, I think AU can find space to post these questions on this site.

Nobody is forced to answer these questions or to even view them.

Yes there was a phony vote to settle this matter earlier this year, something like 40 people out of a total of 25 million Ubuntu users voted to ban EoSS questions. This is far from a quorum.

Answer 8

I for one would rather more content be moved off this site entirely when it's determined to not be unique to Ubuntu. It would be better for those projects that we're supporting and the other communities on StackExchange,

Why is Ubuntu.SE answering questions about Database installs and functionality, such as

• postgresql
• mysql
• mariadb

All of those questions seem like they'd find a better home on Database Administrators than here.