Re: F-spot user forum

[Martijn Vermaat <mvermaat cs vu nl>]

Op ma, 19-06-2006 te 09:10 +0300, schreef Dotan Cohen: 
> Also, and this may sound rediculous but it's true, having both the
> wiki and a seperate FAQ site is two sites supporting f-spot, rather
> than one. Even if they have mostly the same information. That's
> important for people googling solutions or considering a switch to
> fspot. I, for one, have reservations about switching to a product with
> very little in the way of online documentation. This will add to the
> amount of online documentation resources available to the community.

While I appreciate your enthousiasm, you should be carefull with this.

As an example, in the Ubuntu community I see more and more problems
originating from 'third-party' documentation. Sometimes it's someone's
ego, sometimes they just don't know how to contribute to the official
sources, but documentation scattered around the web is a problem for a
number of reasons:

* Unfortunately, a lot of howto's and tutorials are of questionable
quality and advocate bad practice solutions. There's no way for the
project to control this.

* Maintainability is a problem. New versions of the software require
updated documentation.

* Almost never are these howto's and tutorials available in more than
one language. The official documentation for Ubuntu gets translated by
the translation teams. F-Spot has not translated its homepage I think,
but it could in the future.

* Last but not least, duplicate efforts are often a waste of time,
especially when the official source for documentation could have been
improved and/or the alternative source is harder to find.

Some alternative sources of documentation don't suffer from most or all
of these problems, but I know that all these problems are serious for
the Ubuntu community. I don't think other projects are different.

> I don't want to replace the wiki, rather to make a seperate source of
> information that is more concice and easier to digest.

Why not add some sort of FAQ page to the wiki in the form you envision?
If people really need it, I think you would certainly be allowed to work
on that.


-- 
Martijn Vermaat

mvermaat cs vu nl
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mvermaat/