modifying yelp

[Vikram Dhillon <dhillonv10 gmail com>]

Hi all,
    Hope everyone's doing good. I have seen over a period of time that
    our current state of documentation is a little out of shape, we write stuff
    then it gets outdated, so we have more to write, and most people
    don't even use the docs. they would much rather just google stuff,
    and also something that has been brought up before a lot is that as
    we use mallard, are we really focusing on what users want? So we need to 
    find a way to refresh our docs it and find an efficient way of getting 
    and updating more info. (quite possibly automatic like sru) and correctly 
    obtaining and using user-input. Some of these goals might seem far-fetched 
    but we can accomplish them over the time of if not 1, 2 release cycles. 
    Here are some of the steps that we could take:

1. I have been working with some people over at google, and we can use a script used made
by Phil that analyzes what people are asking over IRC channels, and we
can also give some keywords to the specific software/package we care
for. Phil's script is in one of my branches :) and from google, if we
ask them on nicely I am pretty sure they would let us use some analytics :) From 
that information we can better focus on what the user needs.

2. Documentation is good if we keep it updated, I have been playing around
with yelp to implement some features with the same idea as rss so we
can direct/send new information painlessly which would be sort of like a
patch but will also help keep the docs. updated from time to time.

3. The most important one, we NEED a online system like google sidewiki
where users can go and comment on what they liked on the page they were
reading, or something rather inside yelp again that users can use to
send through comments, google's sidewiki has an awesome spam protection
algorithm that we can also use. This connects us directly to the users
and combined with step one we can see what the users are looking for the
most and send them this information.

4. A last step would be to write a script that automatically convert
wiki pages to docbook markup, something like that already exists in
gnome, I remember seeing an email conversation on that topic so I'll
pull that script and see how we can use it here

All this sound nice but its pretty tricky to implement. But then again,
to achieve something you've never had before, do something you never did
before :) I'll put it a lot of my time into this and see how we can
split this up if others show interest as well. There's a lot more to
this that I have posted up here so I would like to know what others
think of this so far. Thanks for your time guys. 

-- 
Regards,
Vikram Dhillon