Re: quo vadis, docs

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> What is Pulse? What is Mallard? How can they help?
> 
> I've been thinking how hard would it be to have a very basic webkit
> based editor that would convert the html it generates into docbook?
> 
> Really, good documentation writers are most likely people with no
> skills on SVN/DVCS/Docbook/XML whatsoever. We should provide a focused
> editor supporting the very basic stuff to write a good GNOME document.
I second this. For some time I've been thinking that a wiki infrastructure would be the only way to really improve GNOME's documentation.

Many people contribute to Wikipedia, which is not WYSIWYG, so if DocBook/Mallard's syntax is not so hard to learn, I guess we can leverage a large support from users. See how distribution docs are good on many subjects. People (included myself) like to contribute if the starting cost is not too high. And especially following a thematic organisation around common problems rather than a boring explanation of the GUIs.

I don't know if setting up such a system would be easy, but IMHO that would definitely help our heros at the documentation team.