(Rerouting discussion to correct list)
John, Jim,
great that you come up with these suggestions. We are actually
thinking about exactly that, i.e. using the wiki for allowing
the community to edit and comment on the application help.
Unfortunately, this requires some major changes in the
workflow and poses some challenges wrt synchronization,
user access control, etc
A *very* rudimentary proposal was put on the wiki a while
ago
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/Wiki_Help
but currently the project is stalled, mainly due to a
painful lack of time and resource to look into this.
It's really encouraging to see you guys come up with
a similar suggestion so we see our thoughts are not
completely off-track :-)
BTW: why not join the documentation project and the mailing
list to be part of the discussion once it gets started?
Frank
John Toliver wrote:
Meaning the online version of help that ships with each version of Oo.o
would basically be an offline wiki that could be edited and then synced with
an online version of the same?
I think any format the help file took would work and, speaking only
conceptually, a wiki might be the best idea since it's routes are
essentially on the web anyway. The challenge I see, is how to go through
the review process of selecting what is the best way to word the content,
and what topics get documented.
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Jim Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Similarly the help docs could be linked to a wiki and the users could edit
any existing notes or be encouraged to add new notes if a suitable wiki page
did not exist. One question is how help pages would be mapped to wiki topics
(but I know nothing about the online help org so cannot comment). Online
help might then evolve from wiki topics.
John Toliver wrote:
In the course of googling for another problem I was working on, I
thought
about an idea for a way to increase the amount of available contributors
to
the documentation effort without adding to the workload of those already
working on the project. Here is a snippet from an email I sent to DBA
users, in which they subsequently referred me here:
A possible feature enhancement would be a way to enter your own notes
( ie.
discoveries while working with the program and other comments etc.) into
the
help file in a way that is clearly marked as "user submitted" so the
user
knows the information came from they the user, and not a developer
writing
the code. >And for this information to then be submitted for review by
the
documentation group and if approved, added, into future versions of the
help
file. In one sense, >this may aid the help file writers in the
documentation process by shifting some work load to end users to enhance
the
help file in a safe format. While >admittedly I've thought about the
implications of this, namely, someone will need to be on the receiving
end
to actually review each addition but it may be a >way for end user with
minimal effort to contribute to OO.o (and as a side note, a way of
guesstimating approximately how many users worldwide are actively >using
Openoffice)
Maybe this may find it's way into openoffice 4.....maybe not :-)
--
Frank Peters
Documentation Project Co-Lead
The OOo Documentation Project:
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