Alex Vincent wrote:
Alex: As common knowledge, Help Docs are somewhat lacking. I am working on revising them at the moment.Gervase Markham wrote:I hate to rain on your parade, but I don't think this is going to work. Reading between the lines, you want ActiveState and Netscape to pay you to write documentation, and everyone else to donate you equipment and money (including the US Government), while no-one has any control over what you actually do. :-) Forgive me for suggesting that this is somewhat optimistic.
That wasn't my intention, really. But the point is clear.To be frank, the one thing I haven't seen come out of all the initiatives and defined process which you've spun up in this newsgroup and elsewhere is some actual documentation for Mozilla. (But it's perfectly possible that I haven't been paying enough attention when you've announced it.) If you had a strong track record of writing excellent docs, then Netscape might have hired you long ago, and given you some of what you want in your suggestion. After all, it happens to a lot of the hackers :-)Gerv: hate to burst your bubble, but jkeiser beat you to it :) He already told me I was blowing smoke and couldn't see through it...
I don't want this post to seem discouraging, but I did say quite a while back that defining processes and procedures does not produce documentation, and it's quite sad to be proved right. The standard mozilla.org process is to reward those who show competence and commitment at a job with oversight over that people doing that job (called 'module ownership' in code), assuming that they want it, of course. So far in documentation, this has not happened.
I do want this post to be constructive, so here it is: job #1 should be to write documentation. If we start getting enough of it that process is needed, process will emerge. Let anyone who wants to help mozilla.org with docs (which is definitely something we need) be in no doubt: writing docs is the way to help :-)
Gerv
According to him (and this makes sense), we really need a targeted list of "most doomed" areas of documentation -- feedback on what areas we most badly need docs on. That's something I've really overlooked in all my design and occasional bits of gung-ho.
Can we get a one-paragraph blurb posted to the mainpage (m.o/index.html) asking people to specifically tell us what's "most doomed" for docs?
--
Brant Langer Gurganus
Default QA Contact, Tech Evangelism
Default QA Contact, Calendar
