Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Earlier, Frank asked whether the source for the OOoAuthors books would
be the wiki in future. This was in the context of perhaps combining
those books with the "official" User Guide on the wiki.
I asked on the OOoAuthors list for people's preferences on keeping the
source as ODT or wiki. So far everyone who has expressed an opinion
(including translators) has been in favour of ODT.
This preference is not surprising, because the people working on
OOoAuthors material are self-selected to be people who want the main
output to be books.
I am thinking that Alan's comments about the most efficient use of
resources may be superceded by questions like: who is available to
work on documentation, what type of documentation do they want to work
on, and what formats do they feel comfortable working on? Will the
people who prefer the wiki actually produce more documentation than
those of us who prefer ODT? I don't know the answer to that.
The reason the Wiki is a GOOD direction for this is that, as Wikipedia,
Gentoo-wiki.com, and others show, updating a Wiki and keeping it
current, is vastly easier to do than a document. People are more apt to
fix a quick issue they find, than if they have to download the document,
fix it, then post it somewhere.
With the Wiki, a change can be made right there.
I do know that we at OOoAuthors have produced a lot of good
documentation (not perfect, and not as up to date as we would like,
but it's there and it's being translated into several languages) and
we are continuing to do so.
Further, I suspect that at least some of us who prefer ODT will choose
not to make the switch to the wiki, regardless of what OOo Docs
decides to do, and therefore some of us won't directly contribute to
that effort.
Lastly, I think that producing documentation for an office suite in
any other format than its own is not a good advertisement for the
product. By all means, have documentation on the wiki, but produce at
least some of it using the product itself. Perhaps the "some of it"
should be the OOoAuthors books.
Keep in mind, I do not advocate doing EVERYTHING in the Wiki. It would
be nice because it catches those people that want to fix something
quick, and be done with it. There are more people willing to do that,
than there are that want to do a massive commitment in a whole chapter
of a book.
--Jean
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Scott Carr
OpenOffice.org
Documenation Co-Lead
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