Re: Documentation

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Steve Willoughby <swilloughby1970 gmail com>
wrote:

> I'm available with quite a bit of free time to work
> on docs, wiki's, etc.
> Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Hi Steve!

There's plenty to do on documentation, so any help you
can give us would be very welcome.

We've just recently been discussing what we can do to
encourage new volunteers, and also to retain them
(chaining them up in a dungeon was a complete failure,
sadly ;)
So you can help us *doubly* by telling us about any
barriers you encounter with getting started working on
the docs team, be they technical, social, or anything
else.

We have some page on the gnome wiki about getting
started, but they themselves need work as they
somewhat spiralled out of control some time ago: 
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Contributing
is out of date in parts
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Join
suggests a list of herculean tasks and reading
material to go through before you even get started.

That being the case, I'm going to try a quick quiz:

* are there any particular gnome applications you
like, whose manuals you'd like to work on? The docs
team is quite thin on the ground, so the chances are
either nobody is working on it, or whoever is will
gladly accept help.
* would you rather find things here and there to fix?
* alternatively, would you prefer it if I found some
simple tasks for you to have a go at?

If the latter...
* do you know DocBook at all?
* if not, are you comfortable working with markup such
as HTML or XML?
* how about using cvs and making patches?
(If the answer to any of these is no, you can still
submit bugs along the lines of "change THIS text to
THAT in section X")

Welcome to the team!
(The dungeon entrance is the second on the left, by
the way.)



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