Hi Andrea,
I wasn't aware of this (I have a couple of "issues" open relating to the
documentation) - it may be worth posting to the user-list too.
I suspect having the docs in git makes them significantly less accessible
than a more conventional wiki, which may explain the lower participation
from non-developers. Almost everyone can figure out how to use a wiki in a
couple of minutes, but to do the GeoServer docs you need extraneous
software (git, or gitextensions for a GUI), an understanding of version
control, something that can transcribe ".rst" files (I'd never encountered
them before) *and* the willingness/knowledge to actually update the
documentation.
I'm not saying to convert the documents to a wiki (research* suggests
that'd be a bad idea), but you can see how one of these has a much larger
barrier to entry than the other.
* - the Research alluded to is a fascinating paper titled "Creating and
evolving developer documentation: understanding the decisions of open
source contributors" -
http://cs.queensu.ca/~ahmed/home/teaching/CISC880/F11/papers/Documentation
_FSE2010.pdf
It does a comparison of documentation contribution issues for 19 documents
for Open Source projects. I'd suggest giving it a read - there are probably
lessons in there for how to increase community participation that could
help GeoServer.
That said, at some point I'll try and use this information to resolve my
own documentation issues.
Just my 2pence. :-)
Jonathan
On 23 April 2013 13:14, Andrea Aime <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Christian Mueller <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> The whole security documentation is not up to date and many features are
>> not described until now. It is a matter of time and money, paid work has to
>> be done first.
>>
>
> I'd like to remind the whole community that the documentation is something
> that anybody can write, does
> not require programming skills, though a bit of familiarity with the
> command line is preferable to
> write docs in Sphinx and be able to commit them using git.
>
> There are over 2000 people subscribed to this mailing list, yet it seems
> only developers are contributing to
> the docs (and very few of this large audience care to answer other
> subscribers questions).
> Seems a pretty unique situation, other large projects have non programmers
> contributing to the
> docs.
>
> If anybody is interested, the docs are here:
> https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/tree/master/doc/en
>
> And some instructions can be found here:
> http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/docguide/
>
> and an introduction to git for non programmers:
> http://www.sitepoint.com/version-control-git/
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>
>
> --
> ==
> GeoServer training in Milan, 6th & 7th June 2013! Visit
> http://geoserver.geo-solutions.it for more information.
> ==
>
> Ing. Andrea Aime
> @geowolf
> Technical Lead
>
> GeoSolutions S.A.S.
> Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
> 55054 Massarosa (LU)
> Italy
> phone: +39 0584 962313
> fax: +39 0584 1660272
> mob: +39 339 8844549
>
> http://www.geo-solutions.it
> http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it
>
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