On Saturday 2002-11-30 00:23 +0100, Fabian Guisset wrote:
> Morgan Landry wrote:
> > I have decided not to update 
> > http://www.mozilla.org/docs/mdp/docstat.html. I will discontinue helping 
> > this web site.  I did not get the help I needed to compile the list of 
> > relevant documentation. There's simply no way I can look up each piece 
> > of documentation on mozilla.org and determine what needs to be updated 
> > on my own. I am displeased with the lack of help I have received in 
> > accomplishing this task.
> 
> If the mozilla.org staff needed any other proof that the current 
> documentation system doesn't work, they have it.
> I don't have time to do anything documentation-related anymore, but I 
> feel your pain, Morgan.

Is it the system that doesn't work or just the lack of documentation?
No matter how many people we have who want to organize the writing of
documentation, we still need people who are able and willing to write
it.  If there aren't people who are able and willing even to tell you
what documentation needs to be written, how do you expect to find people
knowledgable enough to actually write the documentation?  (Perhaps the
people in question would rather just write the documentation when they
have time rather than putting their ideas on a centrally planned list?)

Perhaps we'd be better off with a bazaar rather than a cathedral?  Maybe
we should have a sort of a "suggestion box" for suggestions for
documentation that people would like to read.  Then there would be room
for documentation organizers who could forward such suggestions to the
people who would be able to write the documentation.  The organizers
could also encourage (and annoy, etc.) the potential writers (such as
module owners) to write documentation (with the amount of encouragement
or annoyance proportional to the number of requests).

-David

-- 
L. David Baron        <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >

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