status of changing documents for gutsy
Matthew East
mdke at ubuntu.com
Thu Jun 14 21:21:55 UTC 2007
Hi Duncan/Jonathan,
* Duncan Lithgow:
> On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 21:44 -0400, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
>> Now that Tribe1 has been out for a bit, has then been any updating going on
>> the documents yet?
>
> Thanks for raising this Jonathan.
>
> I would like to join this question. I often have ideas and want to make
> small contributions, but I can't really find out what the status of
> anything is...
>
> Several times I've seen good ideas dissolve into "we haven't decided
> what direction the docs are taking..."
You're right, but I don't think we can use that excuse any more. Over
the course of the last release cycle, we did decide the direction, and
implemented it.
> I was wondering if we could use the wiki better, maybe have a list of
> shortterm/ midterm and longterm goals? Please put me right if I just
> haven't found the relevant pages.
Again, you are quite right. The current
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Tasks page is very poor and
such a list would be a good idea. I've got some ideas in mind for the
basic direction I'd like things to go in, and I've articulated them a
couple of times in various discussions with others, but as a team we
haven't produced anything for the wiki, and we should. We should do so
after the meeting that Rich is organising.
>> Are we still moving forward with the topic based help structure?
> Personally I don't think topic based works well, but that doesn't mean
> much. What I think it does mean is that there should be a choice.
> There's no special reason why both structures can't be available. It's
> content navigation, not content in itself.
I think people are getting a little bit confused about this "topic basic
help" concept - it's not so much a structure as simply a way of writing
helpful documentation. Re-reading the original spec will probably make
things clearer - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TopicBasedHelp
At least from the Ubuntu side, the best way to rationalise what happened
with the structure over the last release was that the various sections
in the "Desktop Guide" were changed slightly to make them more
user-friendly, and moved up a level so that the user sees them as soon
as opening the Desktop Help System [1], rather than burying them one
link down. Other documentation from Gnome and the Server Guide was
integrated with that. I don't really see this as a question of "choices"
about how to present documentation, I simply see it as an improvement.
[1] Compare https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/ with
https://help.ubuntu.com/6.06/ubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html
That said, I'd be interested in what alternative structure you feel we
should be presenting, and how.
> It's so disappointing to see doc pages which are out of
> date and know that they are confusing new users, the opposite of what's
> intended.
>
> For both these points I think we need a wiki with a permissions system
> we can use so that we can protect important documents from changes by
> 'outsiders'. I don't know if moin-moin can do this but I know other
> wikis can. (I'm offline as I write, otherwise I'd lookup wikipedia's
> comparison table for wiki systems.)
See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpWikiQualityAssurance, the spec which is
rapidly approaching the record for specs which have been around the
longest time without finding the right person to do the work on them.
Matt
--
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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