Good News! Canonical Plans to Rebuild Ubuntu Wiki From Scratch

Ubuntu's community wikis have long been an essential resource for people looking to troubleshoot issues, find guides, and learn more about the popular Linux-powered operating system.

For over two decades, these wikis have served countless users and developers globally.

Canonical has announced that it is working on building a new Ubuntu wiki from the ground up. This is being done to address the many issues plaguing the existing wikis that have gone unaddressed for years.

The current wikis at wiki.ubuntu.com and help.ubuntu.com will be decommissioned in August 2026. The first one has been around since 2004, the same year Ubuntu's first release, Warty Warthog, came out.

A small team at Canonical is now working on a replacement.

What Can We Expect From the New Wiki?

The team brings together technical authors, platform engineers, community engineers, designers, and Ubuntu engineers who are already at work developing and testing the new wiki on a private test instance.

Canonical is targeting an Alpha release sometime in 2026. Throughout the development process, the team will be consulting the community and taking their feedback into account.

But, you might be wondering, why go through all this trouble?

Shane Crowley, a Technical Author at Canonical who announced this, lays out some pretty convincing points.

For starters, the existing wikis run on an older version of MoinMoin with Python 2, which no longer receives security patches. This is a major concern for anyone using or contributing to the wikis, and it is not something that can be ignored.

Then there's the content quality issue. The wikis are filled with outdated information that often shows up in search results instead of the official Ubuntu documentation.

This can be frustrating for users who stumble upon old pages when they need current solutions (I have personally faced this when I was an Ubuntu user).

Usability has also taken a hit. Users frequently face issues with registration and login. Page loads are very slow. The styling doesn't meet modern web standards and performs poorly on mobile devices. All of these issues collectively make for a very poor user experience.

In future updates, Canonical plans to share more about their thinking behind the undertaking and provide details on how community members can get involved. So, if you are interested in contributing, keep an eye out for those announcements over on the Ubuntu Community Hub.

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