User Guide Priorities for FAD

[Kirk]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:33:58 -0500
Matthew Daniels <danielsmw at gmail.com> wrote:

>I'm with you!   -  Kirk Z 



At the FAD this Friday, a group will be working on editing the User
> Guide.  This is a great opportunity to get a lot done for the UG, so
> it's important that we outline some priorities on what needs to be
> done.
> 
> Currently, the F9 guide is virtually done and we've starting working
> on the F10 version.  You may have seen Kirk's work on the
> Communication page which is the beginning of our F10 update.  This
> Friday, then, all UG work will basically be for the F10 guide unless
> someone sees a good reason why that wouldn't make sense.
> 
> (*) One big move I'd think would be good for the F10 guide is to start
> cleaning up pages so that procedures are standardized.  This would
> mean, for example, having one very good description about how to
> install a package that can be referenced for every installation
> instruction instead of having 12 different versions of this
> description which are difficult to maintain.  Increasing the
> maintainability of the guide will mean that we have more time to work
> on expanding content and cleaning up style, which is a compromise I'm
> willing to make for the loss of some inline convenience.
> 
> The priorities for this Friday, then, can be split into categories.  I
> really don't see any clear priorities for content; I would suggest
> avoiding the Introduction, perhaps, but besides that all content has a
> pretty equivalent need to be written.  It may be wise to do the more
> fundamental pages first; for example, writing the desktop tours, the
> installing software page, and connecting to the internet would give a
> better foundation for writing other pages.
> 
> Separately, the style of our pages can be userfriendlified.  Grammar,
> fact, and typo checks are easy, but it would be good to have some
> people go through and look for bias, unqualified jargon, and
> unnecessary presumptions to be cleaned up.
> 
> We can also have people brainstorming and drawing out how we can work
> out what I mentioned in the starred paragraph above.  Finally, if we
> have more experienced contributers there, the F9 can be XML-ified.
> This has been done partially, but I don't think it's been finished.
> 
> Please, fellow Fedorans, give me feedback!
> 
> -Matthew
>