[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Cuidado on the ad hominem, Imran. Gerv and D. Baron are simply pointing out something that they and I and many others have experienced, and that is that talk about the documentation process sometimes obscures the important goal of writing documentation. There's no question in my mind that the "awful state" of the docs at mozilla.org comes mainly from the fact that there aren't enough of them, and that what docs there are fall out of currency because they are not maintained.I'm not talking about a "magical tool". I'm talking about a tool enabling easy updates on documents. Currently this is not so easy. I can't understand why you're so negative about this. Why don't you think about making life easy for the volunteers and contributers? Current state of documentation is awful and you bring forward nothing new. And you put the blame on users "who don't provide content"!. On the other hand you don't provide any useful structure for utilizing contributions.
Reproaching Gerv or mozilla.org or some other central officialness for the state of things belies the goal of this documentation-organizing thing that's going on here; Gerv became the kind of person you ascribe blame to because, back in the day, he wrote a bunch of docs and made some tools and in general went right to work on things.
Yeah... You can call "Documents" as "self organizing creatures"...
I happen to think that documents *are* self-organizing. Look at xulplanet.com and the way that Aaron and Neil have "organized" the XUL documentation by writing such good stuff, and then adding to it and maintaining it so well. Probably at one time they were anxious to update my (now crappy and out of date) XULREF or make a process that would yoke me and them together, or bug me about getting XUL 1.0 updates in more frequently, but they have routed around, and they are now the stewards of XUL documentation now, AFAIAC. Get my XULREF crap outa there!
Writing a small, good document about Mozilla stuff--any Mozilla stuff!--is holding a candle to the dark. Some of this more ponderous process talk is theology--and *not* the liberation kind.
It ought to be obvious now, as Gerv mentioned in an earlier msg to Morgan, that the people who are nominally responsible for documents on mozilla.org are often not maintaining them, are not going to take part in a documentation process of any kind (and so, as an aside, these processes shouldn't require them or else they will fizzle), and may have completely orphaned the docs that bear their names. As an author of some of the docs on mozilla.org, I get contacted about making updates all the time. Dozens of times (hundreds of times!) I have taken people's updates to documents that I maintain and checked them in. In some cases--with the DOM reference, for example--I am essentially co-authoring a document with someone who started by contacting me with a suggestion or some updates or ideas. This kind of pragmatic, document-or-particular- subject-oriented approach seems quite effective to me, and doesn't require broad consensus, "official" support, a busy episcopate, or derogation.
.io
