On 09/02/16 18:51, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 12:37:58PM +1000, Jeff Fearn wrote: >> If the goal is to get more participants, then if it's not a wiki or a >> Q&A forum, then you are knowingly choosing a tool that is less >> successful in achieving this goal. > > I don't think this premise is true at all. We're talking about > something like http://readthedocs.org/, The premise is that barriers to entry are greater in tools that don't offer easy to participate interfaces like wikis, forums, and Q&A sites (which IMO are just forums with some fancy CSS). If you published to RTD right now, which is trivial, would it affect participation in any way? > which is *way* more successful > than most wikis. You are comparing places where communities create content to a place communities publish content. RTD is a place for communities to publish content they have already have; it doesn't address how those communities get the content to publish or edit & maintain it. > In fact, I think gardened wikis that work are the > exceptions rather than the rule (Arch docs, Wikipedia, and nothing else > at any scale). Successful docs sites are also the exception rather than the rule. I don't know how you missed mentioning Ubuntu, they are clearly the gold standard in community participation for documentation. > And forums? Gah! They're a nightmare and part of the > problem. Stack Exchange is successful because it very strongly is *not* > a forum -- and Ask Fedora is less successful because it _is_ a forum > which happens to have a UI which mimics the surface-level appearance of > Stack Exchange. > Can you name any sites for generating documentation content that is more, or even as, successful as the Arch or Ubuntu wikis? That isn't a rhetorical question, if there are other sites that are successful at getting community participation in generation documentation then we should definitely be looking at how they are successful. ####### We have kind of derailed Ryan's question though, which should be answered before you look at wikis/forums/whatever. "We really need to nail down what we want the content to be, how it is structured, and layed out before discussing any toolchain changes." Let me rephrase it though, as his question focuses on the docs and the docs team, which IMO is wrong). What kind of docs are the best for Fedora users? IMO the majority of content would be short articles, straight to the point, simple language, with some basic examples. Then I'd ask, who do we want to participate? The barriers to entry should be low enough that the least technical members of that group should be able to participate without feeling overwhelmed. Then I'd start talking about tools that address those requirements. Cheers, Jeff. -- Jeff Fearn Senior Software Engineer PnT - DevOps - Development Red Hat Asia Pacific Pty Ltd http://dilbert.com/fast/2004-08-17/ -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
