Proposal: Better Launchpad-Wiki Integration, Contextual Help

[Brad Bollenbach]

On 16-Mar-06, at 4:53 AM, John McCabe-Dansted wrote:

> Problem: I can't make head or tail of the new Launchpad system.
>
> Proposal:
>
> 1) Every page on Launchpad could have a link [help] to a unique  
> wiki. E.g.
>     https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/+package
> could have a link called help to
>     https://wiki.launchpad.net/malone/bugs/+package
>
> 2) Put a default stub up, for each page, asking for user contributions
> to the Wiki.
>
> 3) Hope that mystical gnomes create good contextual documentation  
> for each
> page.
>
> I would have proposed this on launchpad, but I can't find the "Add
> proposal/specification/whatever" button. ;)

This is an interesting idea, but I think we can do even better.

In my experience, documentation grown in a wiki usually ends up  
messy, incomplete, and quickly out-of-date.

Better, IMHO, is to make the UI easy enough to use so that  
documentation is unneeded for simple things. For more complex tasks,  
I favour developer-grown documentation and, perhaps, small textual  
hints right on the page.

If you're finding simple things difficult in Malone, for example, I  
more than welcome your feedback, to help us learn more about how you  
use and think about the system:

   https://launchpad.net/products/malone/+filebug

Cheers,

--
Brad Bollenbach