Hello Melanie, Thank you for your interest in helping out with Mozilla's documentation.
The documentation team currently meets often in the #documentation chat room (channel) on irc.mozilla.org. If you have Chatzilla installed with Mozilla: you can join #documentation with a click: irc://irc.mozilla.org/documentation . (For more information on Chatzilla, do check out my ChatZilla FAQ+tutorial: http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/chatzilla/chatzillafaq.htm ). Our #documentation channel seems to be a good place to meet other members and ask questions. We welcome your offer of help! There are many areas of the documentation which you can work on, even if you have not done a lot of programming before. Some such topics would be writing FAQs, updating Mozilla's existing help file/end-user documentation ( http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.0/source/extensions/help/resources/locale/en-US/ ) . We currently have several main "themes" which we have been working on, and which you may be interested in: 1)An improved list of FAQs. We most recently worked on the FAQs on the Mozilla 1.0 start page ( http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ ) and would like to continue with keeping this list of questions and answers current. Also - we would like to review and update the comprehensive list of FAQs at NewZilla ( http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/ ) . The Newzilla FAQ list is a good one, but is outdated and contains references to Netscape. For a Mozilla FAQ, we'd need to make sure answers we adapt from Newzilla are up-to-date and do not refer to a Netscape specific feature/issue which does not apply to Mozilla (since Mozilla and Netscape are different in some ways.) Work on this topic is going on in bug 66387 in Bugzilla : http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66387 2)Removing Netscape-specific references from the help file. Since the Mozilla help file is adapted from the Netscape help file, and since Mozilla and Netscape differ in certain ways, we need to "sanitize" Netscape's help files before they can be called Mozilla help files. This job is slightly tedious, but helps Mozilla's help remain accurate and polished. Work on this topic is going on at :bug 46917 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46917 . Also - I have some checklists for sanitizing (and other) issues here: http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/mozilla_documentation.htm http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/mozilla_documentation2.htm http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips/mozilla_documentation3.htm 3)Other issues I have on my help wishlist are: getting help on translating Mozilla's help file into other languages, and making sure all the international versions are in sync. Making a tutorial for newcomers ( http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74338 ) and making a migration guide/ FAQ list for Netscape 4.x users to Mozilla 1.0 / Netscape 7.0 . I know Bamm Gabriana was working on a similar guide for Internet Explorer users. Well - that's a big summary to begin with. Another item on my list is keeping all of us on the documentation team in contact with each other. for you reference, here are some of the people on the team, who you might meet in #documentation: Jay Sheth (me, open community member, http://www.vorstrasse91.com/moztips, JayeshSh [at] netscape.net ) David Gerard (open community member, http://velvet.net/~fun/mozilla/faqpile.txt ) Brian Heinrich ( open community member) Ian Oeschger (Netscape) Grayrest (open community member, http://www.grayrest.com ) MPT ( open community member, http://mpt.phrasewise.com ) Ksosez ( open community member, http://www.mozilla.org/catalog ) Gervase Markham (Mozilla.org, http://www.mozilla.org.uk ) and anyone else I have forgotten (!?) So, hope that's a good place to start! Regards, - Jay Melanie Burrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > Is there anything that doesn't need coding experience? I'm a fairly > experienced 'wordsmith' and a dedicated Open Source freak, but I've only > taken one course on programming... > > ~Melanie Melanie Burrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > Is there anything that doesn't need coding experience? I'm a fairly > experienced 'wordsmith' and a dedicated Open Source freak, but I've only > taken one course on programming... > > ~Melanie
