Benoit St-Pierre wrote:
Hi!
>> How should the Wiki interact with the F1-help?
>
> The overall principle should be that the help file is both
> official, permanent and for every user.
Agree.
> So the wiki is for new, fleeting, and user-case related
> information.
I do not really get the difference you make here. Wiki as
means of discussion doesn't work, IMHO, and points that come
up in discussion as they are not clear in the help (or do
not even exist there) should make it into the docs. Maybe I
see to close a relation. I'll leave this point to the doc
people however ;)
>> I could imagine that in a first step the current help
>> gets imported into the Wiki in a "manual" section and is
>> improved there.
>
> That could be a problem, since now we would have two
> versions of the same document to maintain. Unless we can
> generate the help file from the wiki, which I doubt.
This was the reason of my question. Is this possible, if so
wouldn't that be the best way to get a really user centred
help?
Besides: there are some projects that do not have any F1
help locally, but always link to a certain wiki page online.
I'm not sure that I like this, but one could think in this
direction.
> Even if it's possible to create the scripting facilities,
> we would still have to distill discussions, questions,
> comments, etc.
I had two parts in mind, a bit like Wikipedia: one page
containing the destillate and an additional "discussion
page" behind it. The destilled information being the
offical help that could probably be used to update the local
files.
The only point I'd not have like wikipedia is this senseless
discussions going on there about relevance of an article.
IMHO if someone took the time to write an article it made
sense for him to have it and one is done with this
discussion. Doesn't eat any bread in the database.
>> Depending on the Wiki, it might be possible to
>> regenerate the Scid help from it's contents? IMHO this
>> would be a good idea. One could also go for an online
>> documentation in the wiki only. This has some drawbacks
>> and some advantages. A decision is required here, IMHO.
>
> I would suggest to keep the F1 help as mainly descriptive.
Yes.
> This is not the place for tricks, how-to's,
I'm not sure that the online help should not contain such
things. IMHO the most helpful docs always contain real world
examples: not trivial but also not absolutely unearthy to
show all features by construction.
> side issues, debates, tutorials,
I agree on those, though I think the help should have a
clear entry to the tutorials.
> or what not. You press F1 to know what function does what
> you need, and to know what does the function you're
> activating now.
Agree.
> That means that the F1 introduce the main concepts, then
> point to the on-line wiki for more information.
Ah. Hm. That is a possibility.
>> And last but not least: what about this (IMHO silly) NLS
>> stuff? I have the impression that we might manage to keep
>> NLS current for the menues and so on. But I'm not sure to
>> keep a documentation in any system current in 14(!)
>> languages. To support 14 languages is a huge effort.
>> Just to name it, we're here _on level_ with IBM...
>
> Technology won't solve the Tower of Babble problem
It never does. Agree. IMHO the only solution to this problem
is to drop everything but english. (Admitting that I never
read any docs but the english one in case there is multiple
language available. Usually, I don't even look at a german
doc as it is usually outdated and most likely a bad
translation anyway. But I might be a minority.)
> : either we have an active community to maintain the 14
> languages, or we don't.
I fear we don't have for the docs.
> Here's an idea, though : we could provide on-line forms
> for people to submit translations.
Again, I'd have wikipedia in mind here. There could just be
the same structure for each language. If someone translates
it's there. Thats again a point where it might be good if
one could regenerate the F1-help from the Wiki. Also lowers
the technical stuff for translators.
--
Kind regards, / War is Peace.
| Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength.
|
| Theory : G. Orwell, "1984"
/ In practice: USA, since 2001
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