As we have a wiki at hand it might be a perfect place to organize contributions:
http://www.boltwire.com/index.php?p=docs.contribute

I quickly put together some Documentation Guidelines:
http://www.boltwire.com/index.php?p=docs.contribute.guidelines

Feedback to both pages is welcome.

I don't think it's hard to organize our efforts currently because
there is only a small number of people likely to contribute:
Dan (as Lino said: never let a developer create documentation)
Linly
Martin
Kevin
Hans
DrunkenMonk
blues
Markus

Sorry to anyone I forgot.

How to know what is to be done? I would add a data field to all pages
"unvisited". If anyone is working on a page and made changes, the
status is set to "edited". If it's finished, let other users check and
if everybody is happy remove the status.

This allows:
* to see abandoned pages that can be deleted in the future
* to see which pages are to be reviewed

Markus

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Martin <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is a community project working - it is Wikipedia.
> Their secret seems to be that some people are eager to supervise what
> users are typing in.
>
> To get the same here we could split up documentation work in chapters
> and assign some core users who are interested in BW to take care of
> their part of the docs.
>
> Call them maintainers.
>
> We can have an internal community to keep track all of the efforts,
> doing doc reviews and build up some pressure.
> We would need a wikipedia like strict structure to make the docs
> consistent.
>
> I would take care of forms because I need them all the time.
>
> Greetings, Martin
>
> On Mar 24, 9:46 am, Lino <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I took a deeper look at docs and here's what I noticed:
>> 1. Documentation problem exists in almost all community projects for
>> simple reason that there is no idea how to fix it <> in commercial
>> projects it is clear and simple WHO does WHAT, WHEN and HOW. BW docs
>> clearly shows it's community nature :)
>>
>> 2. It is not just an documentation problem. It's origin is in rapid
>> development. If you change things all the time, WHY is coming up.
>>
>> 3. Insufficient documentation causes small community, which means that
>> you don't have folk resource needed for documentation building...
>>
>> So, just making good documentation is simply not enough. You have to
>> freeze the project at some stable point, make most (if not all)
>> plugins running good enough and document it for both, devs and users.
>> But primary for users (they don't read code :)
>>
>> There is one more thing: user manuals should be written by users, not
>> devs. If developer writes it, one should downclock his brains to 3%
>> and explain to him self how to do do what he is up to.
>>
>> Finally, I suggest to make rock stable 3.5; pass/check/update all the
>> plugins, document it and fix as Lite version. During the time, it will
>> grasp some users, get totally debugged, collect documentation...
>>
>> 4.0 is a different story - but it is easy way if you have good
>> structured and correct documentation as a blueprint for the new one.
>>
>> Dan? Guys?
>
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