Hi, with 2013 being nearly over it's a good time for a New Year's resolution. During the past weeks I spent quite some time going over the online documentation that Mahout has - apart from the book that's still highly recommended for beginners the online documentation really could use some love:
* We are lacking great JavaDocs in particular for packages and classes that should users need to know to work with Mahout. Even if you are just using Mahout it would be great if you could help others get started easier by providing package-level and class-level docs. Check out the documentation section at http://mahout.apache.org/developers/developer-resources.html for links to pre-build JavaDocs. * There are a couple of nice getting started tutorials out on the web. It would be great to have them linked from our web site. A list of HowTo pages that you as a user found helpful to get started already would be great input. * Talking to people who have heart about Mahout I found that we are lacking information on what's actually part of Mahout (what part needs Hadoop, which parts can run without? What about feature encoders we support? What about the Lucene integration? etc). If you have a few minutes writing a summary with pointers to the actual code would be a great contribution to our site. * I would love to see a general FAQ that makes it easy to track great answers on the mailing list and enable others to link to them in case they do return. Anyone who is lurking on the list is more than welcome to help with writing this. There's no need for committer status to write these - actually this might be more of a problem than a help as it means you are lacking the beginner user's view. When wondering how to get started contributing - helping with improving the docs shipped with Mahout certainly is a great way to get started... Let's dedicate the time after release work is done for a documentation sprint :) Isabel
