No, The Ubuntu Manual Project is indeed not dead. We’ve just been quieter than usual recently due to a number of things, mainly because our core contributors have been tied up with University exams taking place, getting real life jobs and generally having a lot of work to do behind the scenes.
Some things have still been going on, such as the Show us ya bugs! competition which managed to report and fix over 300 bugs – and the winner will be announced on July 1st.
We’re in planning mode for the Ubuntu Support and Learning Center as well as tidying things up for the Second Edition of Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 to be released at the end of July and then planning for the Maverick manual to be released on October 9th, 2010. Translations are still going strong, and we have editors for the main languages assigned who are checking the quality to make sure the translated editions live up to our high standard.
It’s safe to say that you’ll be hearing a lot more about this project in the near future, as we have an entire re-branding and team revitalization planned, we’re working more and more with the community and Canonical, we’re getting larger by the day and are planning a lot more products and features for the next few releases that should help put Ubuntu’s support infrastructure up there with the giants, Apple and Microsoft.
I thought I’d share some interesting statistics with you that we’ve collected through our website over the past two months since the release of Ubuntu 10.04 and Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04.
- Number of copies downloaded from ubuntu-manual.org: 107,446
- Number of printed copies sold: 93
- Average views per day to ubuntu-manual.org: 1,000
When you visit our site with a non-English web browser and try to download the manual, you’ll be given the opportunity to subscribe to an email notification when we release your language. Here are the top five languages that people want the manual in (numbers in brackets represent the amount of people subscribed):
- Español (1,355)
- Русский (430)
- Português (348)
- Deutsch (334)
- Vietnamese (331)
And lastly, The top five traffic sources that people use to find our website are:
- direct
- stumbleupon.com
- omgubuntu.co.uk
- lifehacker.com
You can view the full statistics report from Kevin Godby here.
As always, you can contact us the following ways:
IRC: #ubuntu-manual on irc.freenode.net
Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-manual