Localisation of help.ubuntu.com

[Andrej Znidarsic]

Hello!

Yesterday I wrote a short email why having a localised help.ubuntu.com is a
good idea.
I have been talking to David Planella on IRC and realised I didn't
understand how localised help.ubuntu.com is supposed to work at the time.
Now i realised it has many more advantages as I thought.
So I decided (in absence of other replies) to write a bit longer argument
why i believe localisable help.ubuntu.com is a great idea for loco teams. ;)
Now i know the same strings are used both for help in ubuntu (software) and
help on help.ubuntu.com. This means that translation teams don't have to do
any extra work to have a localised help.ubuntu.com and greatly decreases
amount of work required to have a translated online help.
Many teams (including Slovenian Loco team) occasionaly experience a decrease
in activity and hence aren't able to update documentation on wiki (this is
now much more noticeable when unity is here). Even if teams have enough
contributors I believe community documentation is of inherently lower
quality. Firstly it's difficult not to miss something out, and docs team IMO
does better work at this since it's more structured/organized than most of
local documentation teams.
In additon most users who edit local wikis are close to normal users and are
not in contact with the developers as much as the docs team. This means
editors of local wikis are not familiar with all the changes between relases
and need to discover them theirselves (most often after stable release).
This meanes some minor changes or features are only found at a later time or
not at all (especially minor changes such as changed menus or options
somewhere deep in a menu for example). Therefore local community based
documentation will be always less complete and/or updated at a later time.
This can be very important as most users tend to try ubuntu in the first few
weeks after stable release and existing users usually read the documentation
in the first few weeks after stable release too, to see what is new or to
seek help with changed options/programs. So if the local docs teams
functions ok, it will be slightly incomplete/out of date. I quickly checked
a couple of local wikis. While I don't posess a linguistic knowledge to
determine if the content is updated/good quality in my opinion about 10-20
wikis in total has a significant amount of content.
Another significant advantage of localised help.ubuntu.com (I realised this
while tyring to determine how many local wikis are in good shape) is
discoverability, since many new users are not aware of their local wikis.
Usage of help.ubuntu.com allows having a link in the Firefox help menu or a
link in the Firefox startup page for easy discoverability.

In short having a localised help.ubuntu.com ensures better quality of the
wiki, increases amount of wikis in good shape and significantly decreased
the burden of maintainance of documentation and wiki infrastructure (maybe
people who wrote localised help before can be encouraged to join the docs
team). In addition help.ubuntu.com documentation can be easily discovered
and used by end users.

Is anyone else willing to share his/her opinion about pros and cons?

regards

Andrej
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