Hi Vikram, Sorry for the delay in replying.
On Sun, 2010-06-27 at 02:22 -0400, Vikram Dhillon wrote: [...] > 1. I have been working with some people over at google, and we can use a > script used made > by Phil that analyzes what people are asking over IRC channels, and we > can also give some keywords to the specific software/package we care > for. Phil's script is in one of my branches :) and from google, if we > ask them on nicely I am pretty sure they would let us use some analytics :) > From > that information we can better focus on what the user needs. I agree that we should be spending more time examining users' needs. There's lots of data out there that could be really useful to us, if only we had access to it! In particular, I'd love to see the webserver log statistics for help.ubuntu.com and library.gnome.org. I think my IRC script could be helpful too, but it runs out of steam for a lot of GNOME apps (only returning a few entries for certain apps). I wonder if we should talk to people who're used to supporting large GNOME deployments? I'm sure info from their helpdesk system could prove insightful too. > 2. Documentation is good if we keep it updated, I have been playing around > with yelp to implement some features with the same idea as rss so we > can direct/send new information painlessly which would be sort of like a > patch but will also help keep the docs. updated from time to time. Updating docs is a difficult one. Distros typically want to be in control of updates, and some package update policies for stable releases (such as Ubuntu's) recommend against low-priority updates (which doc updates would normally be classed as). It would be cool to have something like the online help browsing feature that Microsoft use, though. Maybe we could pop-up a banner in Yelp saying "An updated version of this topic is available", with a link through to library.gnome.org? All you'd need to do is keep a list of updated topics and the URL for the updated page in a text file somewhere online. This method would have the advantage of not installing updated docs itself (which the distros would probably hate), while still being easy for users to handle. (Obviously, in a perfect world, we'd just download the topic for them.) > 3. The most important one, we NEED a online system like google sidewiki > where users can go and comment on what they liked on the page they were > reading, or something rather inside yelp again that users can use to > send through comments, google's sidewiki has an awesome spam protection > algorithm that we can also use. This connects us directly to the users > and combined with step one we can see what the users are looking for the > most and send them this information. That sounds good; getting user feedback would be really useful. For now, I think a basic "star rating" system would suffice. Sifting through comments and converting them to bugs is a thankless task, and users are likely to be frustrated if we don't listen to their comments and take action. Keeping it simple for now would give us some insight while not generating a massive workload. > 4. A last step would be to write a script that automatically convert > wiki pages to docbook markup, something like that already exists in > gnome, I remember seeing an email conversation on that topic so I'll > pull that script and see how we can use it here We're using Mallard rather than DocBook now. I'm not very keen on writing docs through the wiki because you lose a lot of the sense of the structure of the document as a whole, and there's a tendency for topics to get long and complicated. Version control is more difficult too. Thanks for looking at all these issues, Vikram! I really appreciate your enthusiasm, and I think that some of these ideas will help us to produce really great docs for our users. Phil -- Phil Bull https://launchpad.net/~philbull _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
