ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Patrick Dickey <pdickeybeta@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kevin, 

My responses are inline.

Have a great day.:)
Patrick.


On Sun, 2014-07-13 at 14:50 -0500, Kevin Godby wrote:
> 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>.
> 

I'll take a look at the docs when I wake up. An idea that occurs to me
is if their content is pretty close to ours, we could work on the docs
team and publish their content as the manual.


> 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.
> 

This was always a better reference than the wiki, IMHO.

> (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.
> 

I covered this in one of my other replies.

> 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.
> 

As I said, if their content is close enough (or better than ours), I
would be willing to work with them-- and publish the content as the
manual (if they are willing).

At the end of the day, I think some form of the manual is necessary. For
people who want to read it offline (or in hard-cover).

> —Kevin
> 
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