moving content off of the draft wiki

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 05:07:05PM +1000, Christopher Curran wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 02:02:22PM +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> I think there are some great documents on /wiki/Docs/Drafts/, but
>>> these are hard to find:
>>>
>>> 1. <http://fedoraproject.org/>
>>> 2. Click "Docs"
>>> 3. I might be impatient, but I can't actually find the link to the
>>> drafts (I know it is there somewhere though)
>>> 4. phail :-)
>>>
>>> Ubuntu:
>>>
>>> 1. http://www.ubuntu.com/
>>> 2. support -> documentation
>>> 3. Admire pretty list of documentation that desktop users and
>>> non-Linux people probably want to know.
>>>
>>> openSuSE:
>>>
>>> 1. http://www.opensuse.org/en/
>>> 2. Click Discover it
>>> 3. Click Documentation (lots of clutter, but I found it easy to find).
>>> 4. Nice list of links. Looks pretty
>>> <http://en.opensuse.org/Documentation> rocks!
>>>
>>> It seems the Fedora process is too formal and too hung up on having
>>> 'professional documentation', that all the useful information gets
>>> left behind on wiki drafts where people aren't going to look. Maybe
>>> instead of the fedora admin guide , the drafts sections could be
>>> turned into mini howtos?
>>>
>>> Sorry if I sound grumpy :-)
>>>
>>> I would be happy to convert
>>> <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/AdministrationGuide/Permissions>
>>> to DocBook if it could be placed somewhere other than in the drafts
>>> section.
>>>     
>>
>> You don't think it might have a little something to do with the fact
>> that both of the companies behind those distros employ full-time docs
>> people for their free distros?  :-)
>>
>> It is, in fact, a wiki, and people can put documentation where they
>> want to.  If you're interested in putting up a mini-HOWTO on
>> permissions, whether it came from there or not, please feel free!
>>
>> The idea of a larger administration guide is something our
>> contributors have wanted to do -- the problem being that people come
>> in with the idea of doing a huge guide, and when they realize it's a
>> LOT of work, they get overwhelmed.  Which is why we've always
>> encouraged people to do small documents until they get the hang of the
>> workload and processes that produce good docs.
>>
>> Hope *I* don't sound too grumpy. ;-)
>>
>>   
> I think the original posters point was that the docs are hard to find.  
> All of the examples link to a vast swathe of documentation from their  
> docs links. The fedora docs page looks like this:  
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ . There is nothing there by comparison.  
> There are lots of documents in the Draft document section of the wiki  
> which are more than up to scratch to go there instead. Can't we just put  
> all the documents there by default and then cut the docs that aren't  
> good enough to a "needs work" section or something. There should be no  
> reason to write a howto in the first place the docs should just be there.
>
> The real question is there anything to be gained by the present system  
> over having all our documentation available from the  
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/ link. I can't see any real reasons. Have  
> a look at the ubuntu docs page (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/)  
> That's a pretty comprehensive set of links. We have most of those topics  
> covered in our wiki but they aren't linked from our docs page.

It would be easy for anyone to revise the docs content page.  (The
appearance is a separate issue -- it's just CSS tweaking that's
necessary, and there's been a call going out on the Websites list for
help with that[1].)

If you'd like to take a shot at it, please feel free to come by
#fedora-docs on IRC Freenode and we'll be happy to get you started.

In the medium term, once F-10 is out the door we're going to look at
putting up a true CMS that will work well with our DocBook XML but
still allow user interaction in a wiki-like way.  It is Karsten's and
my jobs to get out of the way in Docs and promote more ownership by
whoever is ready to participate to make things better.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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