ubuntu-doc Digest, Vol 31, Issue 23

[Chris Fordham]

What can one do when the doco is all over the place and there is no manual  
or handbook

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:00:10 +1000, <ubuntu-doc-request at lists.ubuntu.com>  
wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Ubuntu documentation mentioned in article (Rich Johnson)
>    2. Re: Ubuntu documentation mentioned in article (Rich Johnson)
>    3. Re: Ubuntu documentation mentioned in article (Freddy Martinez)
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>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:18:47 -0500
> From: Rich Johnson <nixternal at ubuntu.com>
> Subject: Ubuntu documentation mentioned in article
> To: DocumentationTeam <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID: <200704281018.47518.nixternal at ubuntu.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Information Week wrote up a battle of the desktops between Ubuntu and  
> Vista.
> It was a very fair review in my opinion and they even wrote about our  
> work.
>
> <quote>
> Another area where Ubuntu still needs improvement is documentation --  
> not just
> the online help manuals, but Ubuntu's own prompts and dialogs. Some of  
> the
> wording in the installation texts assumes knowledge of Linux that might  
> not
> be in evidence, and some things are so skimpily documented they scarcely  
> seem
> to be present at all. For example, the entire section on printing in  
> Ubuntu's
> online documentation for version 6.10 is essentially a link to
> LinuxPrinting.org and the Ubuntu Wiki Printer page. The user-prompt  
> problem
> has been improved a bit since 6.10, but it's still something that needs
> continual attention.
>
>  Ubuntu's user-contributed Wikis are often useful, but they're  
> inconsistent in
> terms of what's covered and how, and they also often assume knowledge on  
> the
> part of the reader which may simply not be there. By contrast, Vista's  
> own
> plain-language documentation for many common system functions has been
> improved a great deal since XP, and they've implemented a system where
> contextual help can be supplemented with newer on-line material. (That  
> and
> they've also made it easier to access the discussion groups used for
> peer-to-peer support.)
> </quote>
>
> This just goes to show how important Topic Based Help really is. The new  
> Vista
> documentation and the way they have it setup is absolutely brilliant.  
> With
> every piece of system documentation there is one of those "didn't find it
> here, search here" dialogs that will usually find the information for  
> you.
> Similar to the Visual Studio help dialogs.
>
> They are right about our wiki's, and our system documentation as well.  
> We need
> to use this as motivation to crank out some killer documentation, and  
> try and
> get together and figure out how to clean up and restructure the wikis as
> well. Yesterday during my Open Week talk everyone had the same comment  
> "what
> is the difference between the wikis? why so confusing?".
>
> Time to hit the blogs I think and try and draw in some more help.
>



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