Erinn Clark wrote:
* Helen Faulkner <helen_ml_faulkner@yahoo.co.uk> [2004:12:27 13:14 +0000]:One thing that interests me is the possibility of setting up a project to improve the the ease of finding relevant documentation in Debian. I often have trouble finding the thing I want to know about, even though I know the documentation is there somewhere. I wonder whether the Debian Women project could think of ways to make it easier to locate the right documentation, and whether it would help many of us if we did...Since at least one person has misunderstood, could you elaborate a bit on this? I know we've spoken (off-list) about this topic, but I recall itbeing associated with things like devref, policy, et al.
Well, I was being a bit vague because I wanted to know what ideas other people had...
Anyway. the thing I noticed is that we get a lot of people coming into the IRC channel with questions that come down to the fact that they haven't managed to find the relevant piece of documentation. And lack of accessible or useful documentation was one of the recurring themes in the survey I mailed last month, that some people responded to. So I think this is a genuine problem that is preventing people from contributing to Debian - they can't work out how because they can't find the documentation that will tell them.
I had a few ideas, but I reckon we can come up with better ones if we discuss it together. My ideas included stuff like
- making a list of the locations of important Debian documentation and posting it on the Debian Women wiki. So people can benefit from the fact that someone else already spent an hour searching the website to find a particular thing out.
- rewriting some of the documentation that is particularly unhelpful (the information on the Debian website about reporting bugs in Debian springs to mind), and submiting the rewrites as patches to www.debian.org.
- writing new documentation to describe things that we have worked out, but that don't seem to be actually documented anywhere.
- and of course, there is always translation to be done, and we have lots of people who speak different languages.
That is as far as my thoughts have gotten on the issue. I would be interested in hearing other people's ideas about this...
Helen.