Michele Zarri wrote: > I somehow doubt that people will be more encouraged to participate to the > drafting of the user guide if it was made available as wiki, and on the > other hand there is the danger of losing the consistency and uniformity of > style that the user guide enjoys (to a large degree) today.
The crucial point is to have a good editorial process in place that takes care of that. I wouldn't just open the wiki to everyone and let go. We'd need to set up style guides and monitor the changes. We'd need "owners" for guides/chapters/sections that feel responsible keeping them clean and tidy. A wiki would be a perfect place for reviewing though. You wouldn't even need to touch the sources but use the discussion page for comments. > This is why I think that, even if Frank devises the perfect tool to > transform a wiki in a book, the resulting user guide is quite likely to be > quite unstructured, unbalanced in terms of topics covered and incomplete. > Ultimately my feeling is that the resulting user guide will be of lower > quality than the odt-based user guide we have today. > > I have however read with interest what Frank and Douglas wrote and indeed I > fully agree that a wiki would be a perfect tool to cover the latest > developments of the software. Indeed, keeping up with the new features as > they are introduced in OOo is one of the major issues Jean is trying to > address. If the wiki could be used by wannabe authors to provide a > description of new features, then this information could then be integrated > in the user guide. > > In summary I still think that the wiki should supplement the odt-based user > guide rather than replace it. Like I said, there is probably no one-size-fits-all solution. Frank
