Why are you lurking on the Documentation Project? (was Re: this is for you)

[Peter Boy]

Am Samstag, den 20.08.2005, 14:34 +0100 schrieb Stuart Ellis:
> On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 12:45 +0200, Peter Boy wrote:
> 
> > - I'm missing a list, something like a "Table Of Content", about the
> >   topics, which should make up "Fedora Core Documentation" when it is
> >   ready. If such a list were available I could check weather one of my
> >   texts may fit
> 
> One of the main ideas of the Fedora Project is that it's community
> driven, i.e. it provides a framework to enable people to do the things
> that they themselves consider important. The Docs Project provides
> various kinds of support and infrastructure for publishing and
> maintaining documentation, but they are really processes and don't
> impose restrictions on content.

Fully agreed. But  :-)

In order to achieve a comprehensive and well structured "Fedora
Documentation" I suppose some over all planning is helpful. And despite
being community driven somebody has to make the initial step. I think
the FDSCo is the only one who can this do.

Such a framework  being available may inspire one of the other lurkers
here to contribute a chapter.

(By the way would be interesting why a lot of people are just lurking.
May be they have no time left, may be they get no idea what to
contribute under the restriction of their time table).

 
> [ .... ] 
> Hope that's a helpful summary.

It is, yes. Thanks.

> We have a "New Writers" page which we push as much as we can:
> 
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/NewWriters
> 
> If there a way that we can make this easier to find, or clearer, then
> please let me know.

OK, this is highly speculative and to some extend a matter of personal
taste. But perhaps there is too much information about too many
different topics on the initial page
( http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/ ). May be you should
consider to restructure it a little bit. In the upper part you should
place text and link to the available end user documentation (currently
it mainly is internal project documentation, not what I would expect
intuitively as "Fedora Documentation"). It should be followed by a short
presentation and description of the goals of the FDP, and link to the
page, where where all the ongoing work is listet (the current
EditorAssignments). May be a more descriptive label is "ongoing work".
There shouldn't be other links around it so it's easy to perceive.

Next may follow a paragraph about the need for contributers and here a
link zu the new contributors page. Again, just a single link in the
paragraph.

At the ende there should be all the information about the project
details and all the other links, especially to the details page.




Peter