Hi Documentation Team, I volunteer most of my time as a mod over at the LibreOffice Ask site, and I have a whole mess of questions for you. I'll try to ask just a few per email, but feel free to nudge me if I should rebase any of my emails into smaller chunks :-)
* First off, does anyone here spend any time on IRC? I tried joining #libreoffice-doc, but found myself rather alone. Being able to pop over to #libreoffice-qa or #tdf-infra can be rather handy for quick questions, and it would be great to be able to wander over to a documentation channel and ask questions or direct some praise/bugs/users/etc... in your direction. * What's the status of documentation for LO 4.0? I've seen some traffic on the documentation mailing list pertaining to 4.0-specific docs, however I see only a few chapters in "Getting Started with LibreOffice" available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications I didn't see anything for 4.0 or for 3.6 here: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/ I did find the 'status of tasks' page section for 4.0 documentation, but don't see any schedule or estimated dates for delivery: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Development/UserGuideTasks#Status_of_tasks_-_LO_v4.0 When 4.0 is released, I assume that we're going to see an influx of user questions on the Ask site. If there isn't 4.0-specific documentation released on a particular topic, should we direct users to older published documentation, or should we link them to in-progress documentation specific to 4.0? And for a related question... * Where should we point users who are seeking documentation? I've found quite a number of different pages containing documentation, both on and off the wiki. The wiki page for 'Publications' mentions that "Everything on the official page usually appears here a few days earlier," so is there any reason for me to use the "official" page? Maybe because that will provide users with more permanent links? Speaking of which... * Did the urls for the "general faq" change recently? A number of volunteers have used the "general faq" as a reference when answering questions on the Ask site. In one case, I used an entry regarding java dependencies to answer a user's question on whether java was required to use Base. When I checked the URL later, I found that it was redirected/missing, with a "Page not found" error: original url: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/general-faq/does-libreoffice-require-java/ now redirects to (Page not found): https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/faq/general-faq/does-libreoffice-require-java You can find the original content here: http://web.archive.org/web/20121105054406/http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/general-faq/does-libreoffice-require-java/ We can't ensure that externally-linked content will always remain available, but it would be great if we could provide permalinks for our internal documentation. That way, questions that we answer with links to the docs will remain relevant and helpful for a much longer period of time. Speaking of FAQs... * We have 3+ FAQs and the Ask site -- what can we do to reduce repetition? (DRY) There's one FAQ on the main website, one on the wiki, plus a small dev faq: - https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/faq/ - https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq - https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/FAQ The Ask site is perhaps the newest addition, but contains many more questions (~3000), a good number of which are related to or could be answered by the three existing FAQs. Content on the Ask site is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0, and so good answers (and good questions) may easily be integrated back into one of the existing FAQs. Similarly, content from the existing FAQs (including unanswered questions) could easily be introduced at the Ask site, which may provide an easier format for asking and answering questions. Has anyone suggested a plan for better integration of these tools? I can see benefits of maintaining a concise FAQ for some common, key questions, but I worry about costs of keeping information relevant and up to date if we have the same content duplicated across multiple pages on multiple sites. --- Thank you for listening to all of my questions. I have a few more jumbling around in my head, but I've surely taken up enough of your time today, so I'll stopper-up the question bottle for now. Please feel free to head over to the Ask.libreoffice.org site at any time and pose some questions yourself[1]. It's only fair. I'll be glad to answer as many q's as I am able! Cheers, -- Robinson 'qubit' Tryon ('qubit' on all of the LO sites; 'colonelqubit' on IRC) [1] Yes, this is a shameless plug for volunteering for the Ask site. Did it work? :-) -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
