making help helpful

[Robert Crosbie]

This should probably go to some gnome devel mailing list, but I don't
subscribe to any right now and I know people here have connections, so
I'm just going to float my ideas here. ;)

I noticed while looking at the the help for various gnome tools that
the help was not actually helpful.  They really just provide a
screenshot of the dialog and a description of the fields, but this
isn't actually helpful.

I know that if I'm having trouble with a tool or a setting, I don't
even bother to look at the tools help, I search the ubuntu wiki site,
or the ubuntu forums.  Here, many people have taken the time to write
FAQs, HOW-TOs and various other guides.  So why wouldn't whose people
take the time to actually improve the help for the tool they are
writing a guide for?

Curious as to how I could help improve the documentation system, I had
a look at the guides and handbook. I was quite daunted.  I have little
desire to figure out the internals of yelp, docbook, scrollkeeper,
cvs, etc just to be able to contribute.  I assume that others feel
this way too which is why everyone heads to forums and wikis to write
their guides.

If in the end all the documentation is just xml, wouldn't it be
possible to provide a wiki interface that would make editing the help
system super simple?  Does such a project exist already?  Judging by
the success of wikipedia, wikis in general and forums, I would assume
that this would encourage many more people to contribute.

Cheers,
-- 
Rob.
http://woodpendant.com