New guy signing up for mentoring

[Shawn Dream]

I'm committed to learning more about Ubuntu because I believe in it's
philosophy strongly.

I'm signing up for mentoring and to get involved in the documentation
process because I believe that documentation and bug fixing is the biggest
hurdle keeping people from being able to use and improve their computers
freely with Ubuntu.

I've worked with Linux off an on for many years, jumping in, doing some
stuff, then getting repulsed because everything was too chaotic, too hard,
too undocumented.  With the solidity of the Ubuntu community, I hope that I
can personally break the documentation barrier for myself, and really help
others figure out why and how their systems work.

There are two main things I'd like to help get rolling on documentation.

1) 7.10 - where the heck are the docs?  https://help.ubuntu.com/ still lists
7.04 as the most recent stable version.  That's more than 20 days clearly
behind the times, not even decent for snail mail speed, let alone internet
speed.  I'm hoping there's a draft 7.10 tab waiting somewhere for approval,
and if not I want to get cranking on one, and also start one for Hardy
Heron.

2) Improve the central documentation.  Forums are not a complete solution,
and neither is a wiki.  If a Wiki is too open it becomes untrustable junk,
and if it is too closed it becomes out of date and inapplicable to the needs
of the community too quickly.  My ideal solution is a live tree.  The hard
branches of closed wiki should provide a rational framework for people to be
able to navigate towards what they need, and they should be able to submit
soft leaves of suggestions or issues that are not addessed in that branch.
This provides managed stability and clarity, while encouraging constructive
community feedback and help.

Please help me figure out how to get started helping on the documentation,
with the goal of hopefully eventually being able to work on one of those 2
things above.


Notes on my live tree project:
Forum users should be able to see at a glance what leaves they have open,
and any changes on the wiki to address that leaf.

Leaves should have a tool to easily link to recent forum posts the user
viewed.

Leaves quickly age in a few days and fall off unless refreshed.

Wiki managers can quickly browse the tree for branches with a lot of active
leaves and clarify the documentation, split the branch into sub-branches to
handle different types of issues, or connect the branch to another branch
that has information on a related issue, or add contact information for an
upstream dev, to hopefully help.

Make it easy for wiki wranglers to copy information from leaves to branches.

Package managers could be given permissions to a certain branch dealing with
packages they maintain, to help rassle issues.

Users should be able to ditto another's leaf, (allowing them to choose
whether to follow that leaf if it changes, or stay put) reducing repitition.

7.10->Games->UT->sound->PADSP issues should be the same node as
7.04->Internet->Teamspeak->PADSP
issues,  or at least connected through ALL->System->Sound->PulseAudio->OSS
emulation.

Nodes should carry statistics specifying X active leaves (click to browse)
of X total ever, X% marked as solved (browse recent solutions), X% of old
leaves moved to this (click) branch, X% fell off unresolved.
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