Yet another unofficial Ubuntu guide

[Matthew East]

Sorry for poor quoting, but I've only just re-subscribed to sounder.

{Original poster said:}

> >> http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu
> >>
> >> Very nice. Only in single page, simple.
> >> This guide based on Ubuntu 5.10.

{Dennis said:}

> > Why do people keep doing this?!?! The documentation team needs help and
> > yet people are only doing things by themselves. That is SO not
> > helpful...

{Mark said:}

> Well, another way to look at the problem is to ask "What's wrong with
> with doc team that people don't feel able to get up and running and
> contributing the way THEY want to?". Alternatively you could ask "Are we
> making it clear how the doc team works, and even that it exists?".
> 
> In other words, rather than assuming that the problem is on the other
> side, to see this as a failure of our own community structures, and to
> work hard to fix that.
> 
> I suspect that people don't like to be told what they MUST contribute,
> and instead they focus their contributions on solving the problems THEY
> encounter. I suspect that the guys behind this new document wanted to
> have something specifically like this, so they created it. And I suspect
> that if they'd tried to come to our community and say "we want to create
> this" they would be told "no, you should create THAT". Clearly, that's a
> failing on our side, not theirs.
> 
> Dennis, if you're interested in solving this, then you have to be
> willing to ask the questions the way I've phrased them above, rather
> than immediately announcing to the world that the work that these guys
> have carefully and lovingly done is "SO not helpful".

I've often tried asking these questions in what I think is an
appropriate way. But unofficial guides continue, and they probably
always will. I believe that it's important not to engage in knee-jerk
"we need to stop this" reactions, because it won't happen. First, there
are things we won't include in our documentation (for legal or other
reasons), which people want to know, and it's absolutely right that
unofficial guides deal with that sort of thing. Secondly, in this type
of community, people will always be tempted to begin their own
initiatives, rather than join with existing projects.

But on the other hand, as Mark says, what we can do is try to improve
our community structures so that we reduce the need for these things to
happen. When we do this, we'll improve our own documentation. I don't
think unofficial guides will stop, but there _will_ be more
collaboration, and all documentation will benefit.

What we can do to improve:

* Show people that our documentation actually does exist. This is
already improving, and will improve much more if the suggestions I've
read on this list about the website are implemented. The plans[1] to
merge the documentation website with the wiki documentation will help
further, because everything will be in one place.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BetterWikiDocs

* Making it clear enough to the whole community that if there are
frequently asked questions which is not included in our documentation,
they should let us know and we will LISTEN. There's been an increased
effort at doing this recently[2]. As usual, we can do more.

[2]
http://mdke.blogspot.com/2006/02/contributing-in-documentation-team.html

* Improving ease of contribution - some good ways of doing this have
been mentioned already (upgrading to Moin 1.5 for wiki documentation is
a good example), but nothing will change the fact that contributing to
the distribution documentation has some barriers to access: the
documentation is (and has to be) written in docbook xml, which lots of
people are not familiar with and which can be scary at first sight. To
break this barrier down, we need to work hard on the social side:
encouraging people that they can learn quickly, accepting contributions
in plain text, etc etc.

I'm pretty glad to say that right now the contributions to documentation
have been pretty high: lots of newcomers are getting involved and
chipping in material, and I think the documentation for Ubuntu 6.04 will
be very good. We need to keep building on this and make sure the
community structure is right to bring more contributors into the fold.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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