Contribute Doc - one or two? web or shipped?

[Andreas Lloyd]

Today on IRC, Corey asked me to merge some of the information from the
Contribute Doc to the HelpingUbuntu wiki page which he would like to use
as a base for the next version of the /community/participate page.

But while doing this, I found that while  the succinct tone of the
HelpingUbuntu page may appeal to F/OSS veterans who merely want a
reference to where to go, and which team to join, the Contribute doc
that I've been writing is the more verbose hand-holding "If you're
unsure how to contribute, you can do this and that, and you can contact
the team for more details" which would seek to appeal to new users who
aren't familiar with F/OSS to any great extent.

Corey argued that since you need to have a web connection of some kind
to contribute meaningfully to the ubuntu, we should only have one
version of the doc, available on the Ubuntu.com website at
/community/participate and only possibly in the shipped docs as well, as
we otherwise would be maintaining two different documents covering the
same ground.

I agree that we should have only one document to maintain, but I think
that there is a big audience for the extended version of the Contribute
Doc, and that in spite of its verbosity, it can also provide F/OSS old
timers with the necessary information - and that it can also be used on
the Ubuntu website as the /community/participate page. I don't think it
would be a problem for people to use the Table of Contents to navigate
the extra text. If we are a to have only one Contribute doc - on the
website and possibly shipped with the system docs as well - I would want
it to be complete and able to stand alone by itself.

I would like some feedback on which direction we should take this, as
this is a general question of how we want to build the information
infrastructure to guide new contributors to a situation where they can
contribute.

Or the short version: Compare

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingUbuntu

to

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu
(only consider the top half, the stuff about community communication and
tools is obviously not finished yet, and may or may not be part of this doc)

which one do you prefer?

Cheers,

Andreas

-- 
https://launchpad.net/people/lloydinho