On 09/30/10 10:17, Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Note: I'm talking about *user* guides, not developer or sysadmin docs in
this note.
We discussed on several occasions whether to provide the user guides in
wiki formatas well as in PDF and ODT. I'm in favour of using all 3
methods as means of reaching different members of the audience, but...
We don't have enough people updating the wiki to keep up with changes in
the source docs, so some parts of the user guides on the wiki are
getting more and more out of date. For whatever reasons, the work is not
getting done.
So... perhaps it's time to drop the wiki version of the user guides?
Just put a marker on the pages that they are no longer being maintained
and abandon them until/unless someone can take on the job and do it.
We're having enough difficulty keeping the ODTs up to date, with not
enough people doing that either. But they are the source from which to
create PDFs and any other form we want to have the user docs provided
in. Also, we or others can fairly easily customise those ODTs for other
flavours of OO, and translators use them too.
Comments?
How much effort is it to Wiki-fy a User Guide from ODT source now? I've done
several docs, but not recently.
What I'm thinking is rather than abandoning the Wiki version... maybe a process
like this?
- Create/maintain the guides in ODT
- Publish in ODT in the usual places
- Export *once* per release to Wiki (basic export) and *Protect* the Wiki
pages from editing. This allows people to still use the Web versions of the
documents for reference. Since they are locked/static versions, we don't have
to worry about editing them, or collecting/merging the edits.
This of course would only work if the export process is not overly involved - eg
we could look at scripting it and using the WikiBot to do the upload.
The advantage of this is it provides that 3rd method of accessing the
documentation (which is indexed by Google... which is helpful when you're trying
to find solutions), and ensures that at least with each release, they are
updated. Abandoning them risks (in my opinion) a bit of a disaster with
obsolete information.
If exporting is too much work, then it might be better if we removed the Wiki
versions altogether - set up a single referral Wiki page that points to the
ODTs, and redirect all of the old Wiki User Guide pages to the referral link pages.
C.
--
Clayton Cornell [email protected]
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
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