Feedback request | Documentation site reorg, switch to Markdown

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
Sorry for the long and often off-topic post!

I have not done anything useful in the documentation team for many years
now.  I moved on to other projects.  Even when i was doing stuff i didn't
join in with the team much at all (i'm a bit aspie, i think).

Editing pages helped me learn how to do work on documentation elsewhere,
and how to edit (or update) oddities in Wikipedia.  It was close enough to
html so it was familiar to me and gave me ideas of things to try out.  It
was close to plain-text editing so it helped me gain confidence in editing
config files too and that led me into xml.

I'm not a coder.  I'm definitely into documentation as a way of helping
people migrate away from dependence on restrictive systems and to be less
fearful of trying things that might well suit them better.

I do like the idea of a more consistent look&feel to the documentation,
especially if it makes it look more "professional" and/or friendly.  I
think Ubuntu has done extremely well at that over the years anyway but
mostly by this sort of initiative to pull things together again every so
often.

One good reason (imo) for having different tools for different sorts of
documentation is that it allows people from all sorts of backgrounds to
find a place they do feel comfortable contributing.  Also if one tool
starts to fail then not all is lost.


I thought one of the reasons less people were joining in now was that
permissions to edit some pages has gone wonky a few times in the last
couple of years.

Another reason might be partly my fault :(  I feel really guilty about it
but i value old documentation.  Every time anyone suggests a clean-up to
archive old material i ask the mailing list to make sure that the old stuff
is still available jic it is still relevant to someone out there.  Now that
i have used Arch for a while i do think there is a lot of merit in
decluttering but i still worry about losing people's old edits that might
still be useful.  So, i am a hoarder and feel ashamed that i have always
voted in favour of staying cluttered.

Good luck to all and many thanks from
Tom :)

On 23 February 2017 at 01:26, Peter Matulis <peter.matulis at canonical.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 8:46 AM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Jeremy. It's good to hear from you.
>
> I'm guessing that the new format will work fine for the Server Guide.
> >
>
> This means a lot coming from someone who did a lot of work maintaining the
> Server Guide in the past.
>
>
> > But I'm not sure that it will work as well for the Desktop help which
> > is a lot more visual and has pictures. For instance, this page:
> >
> > https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/unity-introduction.html
> > https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-introduction.html
> >
> > How does your proposal handle that Ubuntu (Unity) currently ships the
> > Desktop help in the yelp Help viewer which is also used by other GNOME
> > apps?
> >
> > I suggest that someone let the GNOME docs team know about this proposal.
> >
>
> These are good points that were addressed in another post. I concede that
> the Desktop is not a good fit for a change of format.
>
> Peter
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>