sorry for the longer time of silence from my side, but i was on the way in the last days.

i have seen your video and i think it is a very nice one. It was held short, and explains a lot of important stuff. How do you think to proceed further ? Should there be a kind of structure like in the wiki --> 1) Installation, 2) Configuration, 3) Addons or something like this ?

> > I mentioned recently in my regular Brew Time segments that IPFire is
> > an amazing project but the support available isn't as good as it could
> > be and so it could put a lot of people off, both seasoned IT
> > professionals and noobs who are going into IT pretty clueless as to
> > what they're doing.

Regarding to the support, i think you are pretty right in that case. To support a project like IPFire it is important to have more know-how that a normal user have, cause a lot of threads and a potential help in there needs a deeper knowledge about how IPFire works. Also to know where to find all the different platforms like the bugtracker, Git, the mailinglists and of course the different wiki´s there is also the need to stay a little deeper in the project structure and also to know what to do if special situations are happening (for example a bug was found what to do now). So in my eyes a good supporter isn´t born by a amount of more than 250 posts. Probably the work in a possible documentation group can bring some further know-how of the project ?!?!

> What made me realize that we have to do more about documentation and
> these things was seeing you being confused about how to install IPFire.
> It's not that you don't have the general knowledge about how to do
> things, but of course you don't have a clue *where* to start when you
> install IPFire for the first time.
>
> Being not too noob-friendly is okay and to some extend I think we should
> not be too noob-friendly because firewalls are not for noobs.
> But lacking essential information for all other people who start with
> IPFire is not okay.

The information about what essentials lacks are very important i think. As longer you stay in project, as more things are difficult to see objectively from an eye of a beginner. May a list what essentials this are, can be very helpful. So if you have some points it might be great if you can list them.

> > I pretty much agree with everything that Michael has said including
> > the bits about language. I am from the UK and hence English is my
> > native language, due to failings in the education system of the UK it
> > is also my only language. One would assume that most residents of
> > Germany speak English as well and so starting from English probably
> > isn't a bad idea. But language links in with the end plan and the
> > future for IPFire because currently the majority of your users are
> > based in Germany and speak German and so it would make sense to write
> > everything in German and then translate it to other languages. But if
> > the plan is to try and expand the project to other markets
> > internationally English would be the best language to use because it
> > is an international language.

So we tried both in past. Mostly native germans who made some wiki articles made them in german, we have tried then to write those people that they go for a translation to english which was sometimes difficult to achieve. So i/we have tried to make this part of work too.

Back in the days where i engage to the wiki work, 80 % of the addons was made in german language and the work at this time was to adjust the english wiki to the german. If people are willing to make some articles in the wiki (they are free to do so with a forum account), they make it rarely in both languages but mostly in their home language. So it is difficult to make sure that they make both or at least only in english.

I need to confess that i do new articles also first in german cause i can better think about enhancements during the writing, also the kind of writing is pretty much different as if i do it first in english, this is surely because i´am not a pretty good english speaker and i don´t think in english language when i write articles, but this is may also a thing of practice. Will try it more in this way.

So some thoughts from my side to this theme.

Am 19.07.2013 um 21:45 schrieb Aaron Philpott:

I don't see anything wrong with it.

I say lets do it!

On 19 July 2013 13:46, Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org> wrote:

Any reason why this discussion has ended without a result?

Are there any suggestions/opinions about the proposed workflow? Can't
believe that there is nothing to talk about...

-Michael

On Sat, 2013-07-13 at 18:20 +0200, Michael Tremer wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-07-12 at 17:55 +0100, Aaron Philpott wrote:
> > I figure now is the point that I should input somewhat into Michael's
> > thoughts on the Wiki and documentation.
> >
> >
> > For those of you who don't me, I'm Aaron (AzzyChill) online and have
> > created one video on IPFire with the plan to develop more in future.
> > I am relatively new to the IPFire project having only really used
> > Untangle for my corporate clients due to its ease of use for both me
> > as an IT support person and my clients as end users of the system I
> > install.
>
> Welcome :)
>
> > I mentioned recently in my regular Brew Time segments that IPFire is
> > an amazing project but the support available isn't as good as it could
> > be and so it could put a lot of people off, both seasoned IT
> > professionals and noobs who are going into IT pretty clueless as to
> > what they're doing.
>
> What made me realize that we have to do more about documentation and
> these things was seeing you being confused about how to install IPFire.
> It's not that you don't have the general knowledge about how to do
> things, but of course you don't have a clue *where* to start when you
> install IPFire for the first time.
>
> Being not too noob-friendly is okay and to some extend I think we should
> not be too noob-friendly because firewalls are not for noobs.
> But lacking essential information for all other people who start with
> IPFire is not okay.
>
> > I pretty much agree with everything that Michael has said including
> > the bits about language. I am from the UK and hence English is my
> > native language, due to failings in the education system of the UK it
> > is also my only language. One would assume that most residents of
> > Germany speak English as well and so starting from English probably
> > isn't a bad idea. But language links in with the end plan and the
> > future for IPFire because currently the majority of your users are
> > based in Germany and speak German and so it would make sense to write
> > everything in German and then translate it to other languages. But if
> > the plan is to try and expand the project to other markets
> > internationally English would be the best language to use because it
> > is an international language.
>
> That's exactly the point and I don't understand all the fuzz about the
> language. People in America and the UK speak English. Nothing else.
> All the rest of Europe and the Americas and parts of Asia are used to
> communicate in English (at least reading).
> All other Open Source projects are in English. There is not a single
> major project I know that is not running in English.
>
> And English is also the language for development in the IPFire project.
> We use it in Bugzilla, we use it on our mailing lists, we use it
> everywhere. The majority of the people who use IPFire is not from
> Germany, so there is absolutely no point in choosing any other language
> than English.
>
> -Michael
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Documentation mailing list
> Documentation@lists.ipfire.org
> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/documentation

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