ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Kevin Godby <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx>]

I just wanted to jump in and clarify a couple things:

1. The desktop documentation that I mentioned is what you see if you
search for 'help' in the Dash. It's also available online at
<https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-help/index.html>.

2. The Ubuntu docs team has very few active members. Toward the
beginning of 2013, the last remaining active docs team member raised
the alarm about this problem before leaving the team. Since then, a
few people have joined the team to try to revive the docs team. This
past cycle there were perhaps half a dozen active members of the docs
team working on the various products.

The Ubuntu docs team is responsible for the following:

(a) The desktop documentation (linked to above). Much of this
documentation has been imported from the GNOME project in the past.
However, with the more recent Unity/GNOME split, Ubuntu documentation
has been diverging more and more from the stock GNOME documentation.
This means the Ubuntu docs team has had to write a lot more
Ubuntu-specific documentation than they did in the past.

(b) The server guide (available at
<https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/serverguide/index.html>). A couple
members of the Ubuntu docs team oversee the server guide.

(c) The community help wiki (at <https://help.ubuntu.com/community>)
is edited by some members of the Ubuntu docs team, but the docs team
is not responsible for the content of the wiki. The wiki admins only
help with gardening tasks such as tagging pages, combining like pages,
setting up appropriate redirections, etc. The content of the wiki is
written and maintained by the entire Ubuntu community.

3. The docs team doesn't have any more insight into upcoming changes
than the manual team does. I think this is one area where it would be
especially constructive to pool our resources and share our knowledge.

4. The reasons some members of the docs team proposed shutting down
the manual project is because they think that people who are working
on the manual project would work on the desktop docs if the manual
project didn't exist. The Ubuntu docs team is trying to find more
people to help work on their documentation.

—Kevin