mentoring for documentation
Hello,
I am willing to help improving the Debian documentation. I feel that
existing descriptions are many times too technical and by this not well
inviting beginners to join the Debian community. I believe that
assisting people seeking help could more target also lower entry level
Linux and Debian users. I am considering to help improving the
documentation in this sense.
Question #1: Is there any mentoring available for learning how to
technically contribute with ideas or text snippets to the Debian
documentation?
Why am I asking this? I have had some first contact with the versioning
system GIT and would know how to accomplish the basic tasks to place a
pull request. Some 20 years ago I also knew how to code a simple HTML
page with its HTML tags and guess that I should be able to learn how
information has to be prepared for the inclusion in a modern web page.
However, my basic GIT skills and my very basic HTML knowledge not
covering CSS and alike modern techniques, both might not be enough
knowledge for avoiding to disturb the workflow of the fluent
contributors. Receiving some mentoring could help to reduce dissonance.
Question #2: Is there a mentoring in the sense of a quality assurance in
place which could approve my contributed snippets for correctness?
Why am I asking this? Willing to especially help where technical
descriptions could benefit by also presenting some paragraphs targeting
the lower experienced audience, I would try my best to prepare text
snippets written from the point of view of a novice. But of course only
the real experts, what I am not, could decide if these snippets are
still rendering the treated topic correctly. I would imagine that the
discussion of a pull request will serve as the quality assurance, but
maybe Debian has other established channels for this.
Question #3: Is there a group of people working on the consolidation of
the present documentation, and how could I join that group?
Why am I asking this? Before I could contribute with text snippets I am
still struggling with the documentation being dispersed at different
mayor locations:
https://www.debian.org/doc/
https://wiki.debian.org/
Even as a simple user, not about contributing to the project, I never
know where to best search for the really up to date information, and
common search engines usually link me to obsolete pages which are not
clearly marked as obsolete pages. Maybe my efforts to help could first
better serve to consolidate information at one place, or to more clearly
present which class of information is supposed to be found at which
location, or to first help marking better the obsolete documentation.
Question #4: Is my post here on the debian-doc mailing list the correct
place to get my first three questions addressed to the relevant
community members, or shall I better post this on the debian-www list?
Why am I asking this? Well, this is highly related to question #3, I
still feel a little bit lost in unerringly locating on the various and
disperse and many Debian pages the answer for this question #4.
Best regards,
Marco.
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