Re: More ways to research commonly-asked questions

[Jim Campbell <jwcampbell gmail com>]

Forwarding Fabian's message on to the GNOME doc list.

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Fabian Rodriguez <Fabian Rodriguez canonical com> wrote:

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On 08/23/2010 10:03 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:
[...]

> Is StackExchange free software? Does it have a web
> services API? Perhaps we could integrate it into
> Yelp.
>

<community hat>
It's not, but it's hugely popular, and IMO a good way to reach more users.

Another Q&A resource is http://ubuntu.shapado.com/ - its engine is
licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. The other main
difference is its support for other languages, although right now only a
few are in use.

This is interesting.  It's too bad that so much community effort has already been put into getting both an Ubuntu-specific Stack Exchange, and then a more generic Linux-BSD-etc Stack Exchange.  Both Stack Exchange and Shapado seem to perform similar functions, but the first is closed-source while the second is open-source.  The latter would also work-in nicely with GNOME's recent push to encourage more use of FAIF web-services.
 

I don't know about its support for APIs, etc. You can ask, well, at
http://shapado.com :)

I don't know that I'd like Ubuntu's yelp to depend on any of these
third-party online services (free or not), as many people don't have
connectivity that would support this *and* such resources risk
disappearing/moving any time.

I'm sure that the details around this would need to be ironed-out, but having the option to go out to a centralized place for help on the web would be a plus, I think.
 

OTOH extending such tools to better integrate with Ubuntu resources
would be nice. Look at the header at http://ubuntu.shapado.com/ - I
linked to the Ubuntu docs - not saying that extraordinary, no! But it's
another place pointing to our docs, and that's good (TM) :)

Cheers,

- --
Fabián Rodríguez
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MagicFab
Montreal, QC, Canada

</community hat>

Thanks, Fabian!

Jim