
On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:36:25 +1000, Basil Chupin wrote:
On 09/04/14 07:30, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:00:18 +0200, Caig wrote:
Really worried about the documentation area as a whole, and the wiki particularly. It's really difficult to find what you search for if you don't know your way. Modern thinking about documentation is very different than the traditional "installation guide/reference guide" sort of stuff.
Most users don't want to read a user guide from cover to cover these days - they want help for the task at hand, rather than to try to absorb a firehose of information all at once from a guide and then to try to apply it to a live system.
[pruned]
Wrong! :-)
You are not listening.
You are proffering *your* ideas on what *you* believe people *should* be doing - or what should occur for *you* to find it more convenient for yourself :-) .
If I were looking for something more convenient for me, I'd be doing away with the documentation entirely because I don't find I need it (other than the occasional man page). What I'm describing is an industry trend. I actually /do/ write technical documentation for a living, so I watch the trends and see what users and customers do and desire. They don't want something that describes that a password field is "where you enter a password". That type of descriptive documentation is, by and large, entirely useless to users, because the UI tells them that that's the value that goes in the field.
The above was from a FWD post which is telling everyone what the people at the "receiving end" - "the sharp end of the stick" - are feeling, thinking, expressing, and wanting.
Yes, and I understand that entirely. I see what you're trying to do, and quite honestly, if you have something to say to me, I wish you'd say it in a constructive way rather than trying to "make a point" by doing this. It's not helpful nor does it particularly add to this discussion.
I have read some parts of the openSUSE "wiki" when looking for information and I find it to be semi-literate in nature, too small in print, and "all over the place" when trying to find information. And is ancient history, not current to what is "now".
Yes, I agree. That's one of the downsides of OSS development - you tend not to have professional writers writing documentation, and in general coders tend to want to write code rather than documentation - so good documentation can be very hard to come by unless the project (whichever project it is) makes documentation a priority and gives it specific attention.
(And, of course, now I will be asked to provide examples of what "is ancient history" - sigh :-( .)
If you want to see what I consider to be most helpful documentation on a Linux distribution have a look at the ones for Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community
and especially:
Both clearly set-out, in easy to read font.
Because Ubuntu caters to new users, and apparently has made documenting things in a way that's digestable for new users a priority. That doesn't mean, though, that users will tend to dig into a documentation set rather than, for example, visit the Ubuntu forums and ask a question, even if it's covered in the documentation and even if it's easy to find. The trend (and I'm not saying /every/ user does this, that's not a 'trend') is that the user goes for what is most convenient for them - to ask a question and wait to be told the specific answer they need rather than have to even search for it. The only way to effectively combat that behaviour is to make the information more conveniently available than even asking a question. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org