Andrea Pescetti wrote: > On 08/06/2014 Keith N. McKenna wrote: >> I am more than willing to help but I am tired of beating my head against >> walls. > > Well, volunteers come and go. Your messages had the effect to reactivate > some people, fortunately! > >> We really do not have a documentation team at this point. What we appear >> to have is a group of individuals doing there own thing on there own >> schedule. > > This is not good, but still more structure won't help. People become > respected in a field through mutual recognition. This is working well > for other OpenOffice fields, like localization and QA. > In this case Andrea I feel that a little more structure may be just what is needed. In some ways documentation is a very different area than other OpenOffice fields. Most other fields have a fairly narrow scope. Localization for instance is primarily translation. That in itself defines the basic skills needed, that of an understanding of English, as that is the primary language the code is written in, and a deep knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of the language you are translating to.
Documentation on the other hand has a very broad scope. It covers writing, editing, publishing, graphic arts, etc. This is it's strength and also it's weakness. It is a strength in that it is an area that many people who might not otherwise be able to contribute can do so. It is a weakness in that at first glance it appears to be very hectic and disorganized. Though I believe that the level of structure the ODFAuthors has is a bit of overkill for an Apache Project, what we have is clearly not doing the job either. There has to be a middle ground that can be reached so that we can produce quality documentation. The other alternative is one that has been proposed before on the dev list; That we not do documentation and let the greater Eco-system fill that role. >> I sent out requests months ago for people to proofread pages >> that I had made major revisions to and nobody replied and certainly >> nobody looked at the pages. > > I can tell you why. You never sent links, just titles (at least, I > remember noticing this in a few occasions). And probably people were > left wondering where to find those pages. Maybe give it a try to > welcoming new volunteers (or volunteers who become active again) with a > link to a page to be reviewed, a specific one for each volunteer, and > asking that they give feedback within a few days. We will surely get > more work done (even though we can't vouch for quality of course), And > then maybe someone will take up more ambitious tasks. > Not providing a link was clearly an oversight on my part and something that I will rectify forthwith. That said the fact that over a month has passed and there has not even been a reply saying "where can I find this?" also speaks volumes. > And thanks for all your efforts so far, I hope they can start paying off > soon. > As do I. I would hate to see the project take the alternative of leaving documentation to the Eco-system. Regards Keith > Regards, > Andrea. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: doc-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: doc-h...@openoffice.apache.org
