Hi Martin,
I didn't see a suggestion to "throw away" anything in Tom's post. I
think the suggestion was to simply focus on the user guide if you have a
choice.
And I don't know how Slovenian team works, maybe you are committed to
maintaining and updating the Help yourselves, but if not (that is, if
you only correct minor mistakes and sync our translation with English
original, which, according to Tom, is outdated), then with every new
major release, that help content becomes less and less covering, in
which case, it might become worth throwing away (or, more likely,
reworking it into something better and perhaps easier to maintain) at
some point. ;)
Rimas
2013.02.14 11:55, Martin Srebotnjak wrote:
Tom, I do not agree with you.
Slovenian team will not throw away the translated help nor will it
allow to throw away its translated help. We do not have a translated
user guide, but are working on it. And let me tell you, even the user
guide is not completely up-to-date.
Lp, m.
2013/2/14 Tom Davies <[email protected]>:
Hi :)
>From what i can make out there has been almost no-one updating the in-built
help in the last 8 years or so!
The requirement to understand Xml means that people whose skills are in
producing good quality documentation are unable to understand or work on the
in-built help. So if anyone has been updating the in-built help then it's been
people that understand coding well but not necessarily grok the nuances of
non-technical-human communication.
Any translation teams that have done straight translations into their own
languages now have very out-dated in-built help packages. In the past that has
not been too much of a problem. Sun aimed for stability and tried to suppress
innovation and new-feature development. With LibreOffice it is becoming a big
problem. Hopefully translators have been usign their own skills as producers
of good quality work to modify and add to the in-built help. In which case we
need a translation back into English in order to update what we have.
On the English User Support lists we have had lots of people grumble that they
couldn't get LibreOffice to work and that the in-built help was useless,
inadequate or even blatantly wrong or missing crucial features. Many
complained that it was typical of OpenSource that it had such bad documentation
and was a reason they would prefer to go back to MS. Once pointed to the
published Guides they turned around completely, even ending up paying for
guides published by the printing service at Lulu and becoming advocates
encouraging others to use LibreOffice.
Wiki's are great but quickly become quite difficult to find your way around
even for longer-term users. Also since they are often written by normal users
instead of people skilled in producing good quality documentation we again run
into difficulties. Also it requires that people understand wiki-editing more
than they understand how to write well.
So i think that if we want good quality documentation then the focus for
translators really needs to be on the published Guides.
Notice that those published guides are generating a small profit for the
documentation team. Even though the guides are available for free from many
sources people have still made a big effort to buy the professionally printed
guides from the store at Lulu. That happens enough that the docs team can more
than cover the costs of getting the guides into other stores and a bit more for
contingencies and other sundry costs.
More importantly people see attractively and professionally printed guides in
various place and that spreads the word about LibreOffice more.
So i think it's important to stop placing such high priority on translating the
in-built (outdated) help and make more of a push into translating the published
guides.
Regards from
Tom :)
________________________________
From: Zeki Bildirici <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: Jan Holesovsky <[email protected]>; [email protected]; LibreOffice-l10n
<[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, 13 February 2013, 22:13
Subject: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site
Hi,
As we all know LibreOffice help is served in two ways; the locally
installed help package and online help at help.libreoffice.org. I
think we all accept that this huge help content is not used/preferred
by users. Personally i think that a huge percent of users even don't
know these resources.
Like ordinary computer users, we always start searching help from
Google. That should be accepted the usual and normal habit.
I think we can improve the usage of the help with improving the
existence of help and changing the habits of the users.
Currently online help wiki hosts 21 languages, which have almost
completed help translations. But i think it is not enough for all this
localization effort.
LibreOffice gives great importance on localization, and why we serve
less than this? There are 39 languages translated the help over %70.
This means a lot, and more for the users of this language. 18 language
will bring thousand of opportunities to get help, and fight discourage
about LibreOffice.
Not all of our local communities has a network, forum or other
platforms to serve and share the knowledge. Help content is a golden
mine for us. For example, we established our Turkish forum and we have
only a little info there, so Google cannot serve the answers from us,
but if our help content was uploaded, everything will be different.
I have some ideas to make the help content more efficient by changing
the habits of the users.
- Adding more languages to the wiki (over %70 completion or %50 will be better)
- Adding sharing widgets to wiki pages, which we may share useful
stuff in social media. There are usefull widgets for wikimedia
http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Widgets_Catalog * Personnally i am
thinking pick usefull info and share as tip of day in my twitter and
Google+ as the tip of day etc regularly when our language is added to
the site.
- Adding an info bar to http://ask.libreoffice.org/ and inform users
about the help site, which is the first source of self learning and
solving problems
- Blogging about both online help site and embed help to increase the
awareness about this sites in our own language.
- When helping people, kindly notify them that they may have abundant
info from this help
- Improve the landing pages from the users which have not yet
installed the help package
- A little polish (We had some in our Turkish wiki:
http://wiki.libreoffice.org.tr/Ana_sayfa)
Sharing, blogging and giving links to help site will also improve the
Google Pagerank(currently 5 while MS office help site has 8) and that
will result better search resources.
We spent hours for creating and translating this help, whatever it is
thought to be very very outdated(i don't agree) as i said it has all
the stuff and it is a gold mine. We may serve and use it better i
think.
Best regards,
Zeki
PS: Michael, thats my ping for Kendy :)
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