* Helen Faulkner <helen_ml_faulkner@yahoo.co.uk> [2004:12:28 00:37 +0000]: > 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. This might be useful, but I'm concerned that giving a long list of links, while more helpful, is not *all* that helpful. I'm also not inclined to believe that Google should be the one indexing the docs -- there has to be a better way to centralize the information and make it easier to search. I suppose one thing we could start with is asking people here whether they know of any documentation that is really comprehensive, well-written, and centralized. > - 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. Yeah, this definitely needs to be done. > - writing new documentation to describe things that we have worked out, but > that don't seem to be actually documented anywhere. Agree. > - 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... We might want to coordinate with the doc team. :) -- off the chain like a rebellious guanine nucleotide
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