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[matthew.east at breathe.com]

Hi Bradley 

Before replying to the specifics of your message, I wanted to say: I 
appreciate your contributions to this argument and I think they are pretty 
spot on. However, please please please add your views to the wiki page. You 
will see that under the IdeasForNewFrontPageStructure page there is also a 
DocTeamTestingNewFrontPage and a SimpleFrontPage: take a look at them and 
comment. 

Bradley Coleman writes: 

> i'm looking at IdeasForNewFrontPageStructure.  a few things.  whats the
> point of WIKI USER PROFILES?  do you propose to organize things by user
> type?  i could be wrong, but that sounds kind of FAQish to me.  i can

No we don't propose to organise thing by user profiles: that list is simply 
to help US to focus on the purposes that the structure is trying to address. 

> picture large hard to search pages.  this philosophy assumes that people
> will sit down and read the whole thing from start to finish.  this may
> be, but is it in the spirt of a task oriented hierarchy?  then again, i
> have no idea what the intent of this is.

No I'm not sure I follow this entirely, but there is no intention to make 
large hard to search pages. In fact, there is no intention to edit any pages 
at all, the discussion is simple how to structure the material we have and 
that will continue to be added by our users. 

> i like how to use the wiki at the top.  if its at the bottom, people
> might never figure out how to use it. 
> 
> we should also have another link about guidelines for editing.  namely,
> use the structure we make.

The link to "how to use the wiki" (as you will see if you take a look at the 
draft FrontPage I posted above) really intends to have all this information 
linked to it. Take a look at DocTeamTestingWikiHome. 

> also perhaps guidelines can be created that
> would prevent what happened to the java page from happening to any more.
> or do you guys think that would be against the spirit of the wiki?

Everyone is free to edit the wiki pages, if you believe something is wrong, 
then you should amend it, comment on it, etc. Try to avoid deleting pages 
though. Remember that where there are many varying points of view, the truth 
is arrived at through debate. 

> the Documentation heading, what does that mean?  isn't this all
> documentation?  isn't anything that would be under Hardware
> documentation also?

What is meant by that heading was User Documentation. I have tried to edit 
the testing pages taking this into account. Don't forget that the wiki is 
not just used for documentation, in fact there are currently 1265 pages on 
the wiki, many of which are used by developers and other teams (such as 
ourselves) to track ideas and organise projects. It is important for any 
wiki FrontPage to separate out User Documentation from other documents such 
as those. If you believe it does not do this clearly, please add your 
comments to the testing pages: it may just be a question of amending 
terminology. 

> FAQ.  sorry, just joined the jihad.

My personal view on this the debate currently going on is about terminology: 
the people who dislike Frequently Answered Questions pages tend to advocate 
nonetheless a structure based around "Common Problems". To some extent 
therefore IMO this is a semantic debate, at least in part. The other part 
may be simply ensuring that documents are not too long. I have always 
preferred wiki pages to deal with one issue at a time. 

> Installation Documentation.  this is installing the OS right?

Yes. I agree that this can/should be made clearer. 

> Desktop Documentation, what would go in there?  that seems incredibly
> general. 
> 
> System Documentation, again, super general.

I have tried to set out categories of documentation: To be honest I haven't 
thought about it immensely, it is difficult to categorise ALL the user 
documentation on the wiki (if you want to know how much there is, check out 
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UserDocumentation). I took the categories 
from the gentoo documentation, and then hoped that people would comment, 
such as yourself. So again, please add your thoughts on the page! 

thanks again for your thoughts! 

Matt