Thus spake Brad Knowles on Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 06:11:28PM CDT > At 8:03 PM +0200 10/16/06, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote: > > > Using this opportunity, has anyone thought of really making all these > > pages simpler, less jargon-free and more understandable for a typical, > > non-technical user? > > That's a wonderful idea. However, since most of the people who > contribute to these efforts are people who've been around for a while > and who understand the importance of things like reading the FAQs, > this is kind of a self-selecting community. > > If you could provide some contributions in this area, that would be wonderful.
Anyone that does this kind of thing is a saint! One of my big beefs with a whole lot of open source software is that it's written by, for and about geeks, and while the work would be potentially useful to a lot of people, it's surrounded by a haze of geek jargon that makes it semi-impervious to non-technical minds. I run Mailman lists for the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas, numerous other political groups, and for a couple of musical instrument special insterest groups. While the list admins for these are reasonably tech-savvy, the list subscribers are decidedly not. I have to re-work stuff a lot. For a project I'm working on I just de-geeked the Namazu search engine example page, which used Emacs, FreeBSD and other techie terms as search word examples. I replaced all the geek words with fruits and vegetables. Everyone understands fruits and vegetables ;-) -- Lindsay Haisley | "Fighting against human | PGP public key FMP Computer Services | creativity is like | available at 512-259-1190 | trying to eradicate | <http://pubkeys.fmp.com> http://www.fmp.com | dandelions" | | (Pamela Jones) | ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
