Hi Kevin,
Thank you for offer to help! Feel free to ask questions here how to
setup the sources in Eclipse. If you succeed, you could writeup what you
did and we could add this to the website, as I'm sure a lot of others
will have the same problem.
It would be great if you could start improving the javadoc, its totally
fine if your english is not perfect, we can always ask a native speaker
to read over it. If you start working on the javadoc, please create a
jira issue for that work before you start.
Best,
Sebastian
On 03/12/2014 09:30 AM, Kevin Moulart wrote:
I can confirm what Sebastian said, I'm fairly new on this and I did find
myself so desperate at some point that I almost gave up on Mahout dut to
lack of documentation, but my feeling is that it doesn't only concerns the
website : the API is too few documented as well. At this point there are no
simple way for a beginner to know what kind of format any one of the
algorithms expects and what it outputs exactly, how to chain processes
etc... They might go as far as reading the javadoc (although not everyone
does that) but they won't all, as I had to and did, download the sources
and try making sense of them to get the information.
Hopefully the mailing list is particularly active and one can find the
answer if he has time and will to search them and ask kindly, which is a
very strong strength of Mahout, but the average beginner, wanting to just
try the library can't and won't do that.
I'm willing to document the parts of the code I used and began to
understand, however I've been facing difficulties to set up the maven
project in eclipse for now. Also since I'm a Belgian, English is not my
mother tongue so I'm almost certain to make mistakes, but I think it would
take less time to you to correct these few English mistakes than to write
the documentation :)
I'll go ahead and try to set thing up with Eclipse and if I don't succeed
I'll write a mail on the dev list for help in that matter.
I also can, if I find the time, continue my efforts of reporting bugs and
not working or accurate links and descriptions on the website, if need be
and update my JIRA entry accordingly.
Kévin Moulart
2014-03-12 8:48 GMT+01:00 Pavan Kumar N <pavan.naraya...@gmail.com>:
i ll help with clustering algorithms documentation. do send me old
documentation and i will check and remove errors. or better let me know
how to proceed.
Pavan
On Mar 12, 2014 12:35 PM, "Sebastian Schelter" <s...@apache.org> wrote:
Hi,
As you've probably noticed, I've put in a lot of effort over the last
days
to kickstart cleaning up our website. I've thrown out a lot of stuff and
have been startled by the amout of outdated and incorrect information on
our website, as well as links pointing to nowhere.
I think our lack of documentation makes it superhard to use Mahout for
new
people. A crucial next step is to clean up the documentation on
classification and clustering. I cannot do this alone, because I don't
have
the time and I'm not so familiar with the background of the algorithms.
I need volunteers to go through all the pages under "Classification" and
"Clustering" on the website. For the algorithms, the content and claims
of
the articles need to be checked, for the examples we need to make sure
that
everything still works as described. It would also be great to move
articles from personal blogs to our website.
Imagine that some developer wants to try out Mahout and takes one hour
for
that in the evening. She will go to our website, download Mahout, read
the
description of an algorithm and try to run an example. In the current
state
of the documentation, I'm afraid that most people will walk away
frustrated, because the website does not help them as it should.
Best,
Sebastian
PS: I will make my standpoint on whether Mahout should do a 1.0 release
depend on whether we manage to clean up and maintain our documentation.
