Hello *,
as mentioned before I want to discuss the situation of the documentation in the IPFire project. This is a hard topic and I am sure we won't find a solution that will fix all the problems we are experiencing now in a swift, but at least I would like to find out what we are doing wrong and what we can do about it.
Disclaimer: The documentation on the IPFire wiki is not all in a bad quality. There are some parts which are well written but there are other parts which are not. I will be mostly talking about the bad parts, here.
In the last couple of weeks, some people came to me and complained about the wiki. That's what made me think again about the problem. We all know that this has been a problem for years, but as the project is growing bigger and bigger, there are more people trying to find information on the wiki, but they can't.
So here is what I personally think the problems are:
1) There is an answer to almost every question on the wiki, but nobody can find it. The presentation of the information and the structure is not very good on some pages. Some are too long, some things are too short. Some pages are not even linked and only accessible via the search - we all know how much people like the search :)
People who are joining the project and are installing IPFire for the first time are basically on their own, because reading the installation guide takes hours and states a lot of obvious things. What to do after that (like configuring your DSL connection) can not be found anywhere.
2) The different translations are in very poor quality. Some parts of English and German sounds as if they have been translated by Babelfish. We are lacking native speakers for everything else than German, and even there, we need to fix a lot of grammar, wording, orthography and more.
3) Problems 1) and 2) essentially boil down to: We don't have enough man power. The list of people which are in the documentation team is long, but if you kick out all the people who are inactive, you are left over with only a few.
Erik is the current wiki coordinator who manages the documentation team, but there is really nothing to manage at the moment. He is doing a lot of work, but maintaining the entire wiki by only one person is not working. Nobody can do that.
I don't have THE solution to fix all the problems, but I have a few suggestions to make and I would like to hear your opinions about that:
a) We need to encourage more people to join the documentation team. People who actually do work on the team.
b) We need to find native speakers for the main languages which are English and German, to raise the quality of the language.
c) We need a better structure for beginners, because that's the group of people the documentation is meant for. We need to cover things like the installation and initial setup much better, shorter and sweeter, because setting up IPFire is not a big deal, but there should documentation that tells the user what to do next.
I would like to see some things sorted that are essential for this to work:
* There must be guide that tells people how to contribute to the documentation. There need to be styling and language guidelines, which have to be written. Those will help people to get started writing documentation and tells them how to contribute in the right way.
Lots don't know how to edit the wiki. Others don't have the confidence to change anything and are afraid that they will mess things up. We need to tell them that they are not alone in this and that even small improvements are very important - and easy to make as well.
* After that I would like to start rewriting sections one after an other. Maybe we can create a workflow that is roughly like this: i) Grab some topic and discuss what the problems are and what needs to be improved. ii) A one week(?) phase were a team of authors is (re-)writing. iii) A one week(?) phase for QA, reviewing what has been done. iv) After that team of authors starts at i) with a new section. The translation teams translate the work into their respective languages.
The coordinator's task will be (despite writing and translating) to check that process is followed and he will also check if the result complies to the guidelines.
A workflow like this has a lot of advantages, because it is highly modular. If there is more time needed for writing it can easily be extended. Lot's of people can work on it at the same time and they will check each others work for mistakes which results in a higher quality. You don't have too much on your plate and won't lose focus. Everybody knows what the team is working on and can join.
Working on other sections during phase ii) should not be strictly forbidden but discouraged so that there is not too much to do at the same time, but it should be allowed to make trivial changes and so on.
So that's my idea about how this could/should work. Please post your opinions and your ideas at well. Share what you think the major problems are, so that we can work them out.
-Michael