The Newbie's Perspective

[Matthew East]

On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 14:58 -0600, Dave A. Chakrabarti wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This is my first post to the list. 

{snip}

> I feel strongly that one of the areas in which documentation fails is 
> that it is rarely written by members of the community it is aimed 
> at...instead, it is written by techs or other technocrats who are trying 
> to address what they imagine are newbie issues while "talking down" in a 
> language newbies can understand. A solution seems to be for a newbie 
> (like myself) to write documentation while negotiation the various 
> learning curves involved with making the switch. Simply keeping detailed 
> notes while working on various projects seem to be an adequate 
> foundation for such a process.
> 
> Let me know where I should start.

Welcome Dave. A good place to begin and start becoming familiar with our
tools is the wiki: we have a number of explanatory pages there (starting
at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam )

If you feel like contributing to documentation without learning our
tools, the wiki is another good place to help. There is plenty of
documentation there (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDocumentation ) and
lots to tidy up and new things to write. For more information check out
the WikiTeam page.

You might also be interested in contributing some ideas to a recent
initiative that the documentation team is trying to brainstorm on: a
method of encouraging feedback from users about what is missing from the
documentation. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocteamCompIdeas

Hope this helps!

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