Those of you who read the [documentation-dev] mailing list at OOo
will have noticed that I have been asking questions about the
licensing of pages on the OOo wiki.
My suggestion was that the wiki contain a "user documentation"
section that users are encouraged to read, and that is linked to
and from the Documentation Project's first page. In other words,
have some of OOo's user docs available on the wiki itself, for
use by the public.
Everyone who has expressed an opinion on that list has supported
this idea, though there has been some concern about the licensing
arrangements. The licensing issue appears to be getting resolved
in a way that would allow OOoAuthors material to be placed on the
wiki under our current Creative Commons license.
In the past I was very sceptical of wikis as user documentation,
but now that I have used some very good ones (eg for Ubuntu
Linux), I think they are an important -- perhaps essential --
addition to books and other forms of documentation. Wiki
documentation can easily be linked to and from other information
in any form and various locations. Wiki documentation is
searchable, which assists people in finding what they need.
Of course what I have in mind to put on the wiki are the user
guides we are producing at OOoAuthors. Our guides are now
available in PDF and (for completed books) in printed form, but
many users would also like the information in them to be on the
Web, preferably in some searchable form.
My idea is that we continue to produce our user guides through
the OOoAuthors website, and make them available in ODT and PDF as
before, as well as putting them on the wiki... thus giving more
users a choice about how they access and use the information we
are producing.
What do other members of the group think about this idea of
putting our docs on the wiki? Pros and cons that I haven't
mentioned? (Of course there is the separate but related issue of
someone having the time to convert and upload the files. I have
not yet tried out the available conversion tools.)
--Jean
