Help on how to help

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi all!

Reading the last thread I started might be somewhat discouraging, so I
decided to start a new one. :)

A lack of contributors willing to spend time on the docs? Probably.

At the same time, the past weeks' postings to this list clearly show
that there actually are people who want to help out, but they feel it's
hard to understand how to get started. Some examples:

Laura Santamaria
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2013-March/017141.html

Elizabeth Krumbach
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2013-March/017142.html

Kaitlyn Wierzchowski
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2013-March/017148.html

Excellent! (My apologies if I missed someone.)

Now, I'm certainly not the best tutor with respect to the docs - there
is a lot of stuff involved that I don't grasp.

OTOH, as an Ubuntu contributor without upload rights I know how to
propose changes to packages. That's what I have been doing for quite a
while now. Most of it has been about other stuff but the docs, but once
in a while I prepare a docs related merge proposal. This is the latest
example (mentioned the other day in another thread):

https://code.launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/ubuntu-docs/raring/+merge/158248

That way to present your suggestions for changes makes it easy for a
more experienced developer with upload rights to review and approve
them. As you can see, the actual changes are clearly shown at the bottom
of the page - added lines in green and deleted lines in red.

Something I could do is to prepare a step-by-step page that shows how
you install and use the tools for preparing such merge proposals.
Somebody may object now and point out that a lot of such pages have
already been written. Ok, that's true, but my idea is to focus on things
that would be useful for getting started with ubuntu-docs - and skip
everything else. To begin with it would be my version of it, but
hopefully it could later be integrated with the more official stuff.

The target audience would not be experienced programmers, but ordinary
people who can read and write and want to help out with the Ubuntu
documentation. And I would be more than willing to answer those 'stupid'
questions (which are not stupid at all, btw) that undoubtedly would come up.

Laura, Elizabeth, Kaitlyn: Does this sound as something that might help
you get started?

A proper time to do this IMO is now - and with the Raring docs. Of
course, we'd need to know that those of you who 'have access to the
buttons' open up the possibility to work with the Raring docs for a
couple of months.

-- 
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj