On Feb 16, 2016 21:17, "Glen Rundblom" <glen(a)rundblom.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
After reading some of the conversation about publishing for Fedora I
wanted to just
make my observations known.
I am thankful and grateful to Pete, and the rest of the Fedora Docs
team
for teaching me how to contribute.
As I struggle to build my knowledge of Linux, and trying to contribute
and give
back to the Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora world , I learned a lot. However
I did not realize how much of a time commitment in writing in doc book,
fixing my doc book code, test building in publican, and then re-doing my
docbook code because it does not work right on the docs site.
I am not good at it yet, but, the time overhead just for a small chunk of
content
is really substantial. When I described the process of how doc
writers work in Fedora, several people in my local linux users group lost
interest.
I do not know what the solution is, but making docs contribution less of
a process
would substantially help grow contributors. It would also
increase my satisfaction of useable content VS labor (but this will
hopefully improve as I get better in writing in docbook).
Where I work, and the people I encounter (users and other IT Pro's)
documentation is expected to be done via wiki. Wiki's have their problems,
but it gets people putting info somewhere, and that's 95% of the battle for
us.
Respectfully,
-Glen
--
I also have a wiki at work for documentation. There are daily email
threads with links to, or about, wiki docs because wiki pages are not
discoverable, are often redundant, and sometimes conflicting. I believe
this is the inevitable state of all wikis, at this point. Nobody feels the
contribution process should not be easier, but I'm not enthusiastic about
trading one set of problems for another.
--Pete