Localisation of help.ubuntu.com

[Anders Jenbo]

For at least the past 2 years the official docs have been lacking 1 version behind in large parts of the content, so using them would not solve that issue. Loco teams could easily compile and upload the official docs to there sites, so why they instead choose to write there own I don't know. When writing guides on a wiki like site it's a good idea to version tag the guides, this makes it clear to the user if the guide has been tested with there version.
Maybe a better idea would be to make locos aware that they can uploade the official docs.

Having the docs localized on the official site would mean that the links on the installed system could be made to point to the localized docs instead of the English. And the time of the upload could be more regular. But that in a sence is already happening with most of them being in the installation, and it would mean that they couldn't sync uploads with the progress of the translators.

Mvh Anders

Den 05/05/2011 kl. 10.41 skrev Andrej Znidarsic <andrej.znidarsic at gmail.com>:

> 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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