Erinn Clark wrote:
* Helen Faulkner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004:12:27 13:14 +0000]:
One thing that interests me is the possibility of setting up a project to
improve the the ease of finding relevant documentation in Debian. I often
have trouble finding the thing I want to know about, even though I know the
documentation is there somewhere. I wonder whether the Debian Women
project could think of ways to make it easier to locate the right
documentation, and whether it would help many of us if we did...
Since at least one person has misunderstood, could you elaborate a bit on
this? I know we've spoken (off-list) about this topic, but I recall it
being associated with things like devref, policy, et al.
Well, I was being a bit vague because I wanted to know what ideas other
people had...
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.
- 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.
- writing new documentation to describe things that we have worked out, but
that don't seem to be actually documented anywhere.
- 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...
Helen.
