New web based docbook editor project (was Re: Helpingyourdocumentation effort.)

[Matthew East]

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 13:47 +1000, Stoffers, Robert LAC wrote:
Jonathan wrote:
> >  I am trying to see what the big "barrier" is and I just don't get
> it.  Let me explain further, I have alway been interested in Linux and
> always
> >  thought it would be cool to 'give back to the community."  However
> I was a programmer, I wasn't a developer and yet with the simple tools
> of 
> >  kate and subversion I can work on the documentation.  Of course
> that has now grown to working on wiki docs, bug testing and other
> great 
> >  things.
> > 
> > Can someone help correct me? (honest I want to try and understand)
> 
> The barrier is the learning curve associated with such tools and the
> obvious work flow issues that are involved. Proof of this is the
> numerous "unofficial" Ubuntu documentation projects that continue to
> pop up everywhere, people just want to write and not have to learn
> several different tools to do so.

Personally, I actually think that this learning curve, which isn't
particularly steep, far from being a barrier, actually has a positive
purpose: genuine contributors to the team learn the tools extremely
quickly and demonstrate their willingness to contribute. Those who are
frankly not particularly interested in contributing don't bother. And if
we think about it, at least _some_ level of technical skills are
required to write technical documentation, because we do need to
actually understand what we are writing about.

That's not to say that we shouldn't make it easy for people to give
feedback, I think we should. There are lots of easy ways we can do this,
aside from things we've done already. In fact, the improvement we've
made in the area of encouraging contribution has been outstanding in
this release cycle: this is demonstrated by the number of new
contributors to the team (which has really got me excited this time
around), and the number of suggestions from newcomers via the forum or
the mailing list which have been encorporated into the docs.

So, for me, editing the documents directly through a web site is in no
way a high priority spec for us. It is incredibly difficult to do,
because it requires a good open source WYSIWYG editor for docbook xml,
and it also requires a complicated integration with our repository so
that contributions by people who do not have access to the repository
are generating patches and letting us know about them, etc. And the
benefits of the solution, while it would be a great project for the open
source community in general, might not actually be that big for us.

my 2 cents

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