Fedora Knowledge Base / Help Center Idea

[Pete Travis]

On Mar 13, 2013 11:31 AM, "Máirín Duffy" <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> On 03/13/2013 11:53 AM, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > I imagine that some kind of well discoverable (e.g. advertised during
> > installation, or in the default browser homepage) knowledge-base beyond
> > installation guides, release notes e.a. could get us a far way, which
> > would have vetted information about troubleshooting ("So you updated and
> > sound/wireless/suspend broke? Here's what you should check and
> > how: ...") and power-user-ing ("So we welded the hood in Fedora a little
> > too shut for your taste? While we're busy munching self-baked cookies by
> > the thankful Aunt Tilly, here's how you gnaw the hood open again: ...").
> > That this needs a little cooperation on the OS components side is
> > obvious, workarounds for power users either need to stay stable, be
> > replaced by something more or less equivalent (with updated
> > documentation), or rendered obsolete.
>
> I think this is a fantastic idea. Actually Ryan did a set of conceptual
> mockups for such a thing. We need some help developing the design omre
> and also someone to build it, though. We could advertise it during the
> ransom notes in anaconda if need be.
>
> The idea here is that it would be a desktop app that would aggregate
> information from ask.fedoraproject.org (as a kbase backend) as well as
> the Fedora docs, so you could search all places at once. If you were in
> a rough state and couldn't access the network or use the desktop, you
> could access those same resources directly on line and get the answers.
> We'd have to populate ask.fedoraproject.org with some good
> question/answer articles though for this to work well, but it's pretty
> easy to do given the content.
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design/Help_Center_Idea
>
> ~m
> --

While I like this idea in principle, I don't think we should actually put
it into practice.  Here's why:

The docs team has limited cycles as it stands. I realize that the proposal
isn't necessarily asking anything of them, but we aren't keeping up with
the existing guides as well as I'd like. If the current offerings at
docs.fedoraprojects.org aren't sufficient, we should be focusing our
efforts there.

Pulling content from Ask Fedora would require technical curation and
editing for presentation. That effort could be put towards existing guides.
Yes, the guides can be monolithic and a more atomic presentation would be
easier to navigate - but we can address that as a shortcoming of the
existing solution.

The your proposal competes with the docs team for the user attention,
current contributors' time, and potential contributors' attention.

Fwiw, we have been floating some ideas that might serve the same end goals.
The docs.fedoraprojects.org is getting a new backend, and possibly new
presentation if I, or someone, can work up some CSS for the Fedora publican
brand. We've discussed shipping guide rpms in the user repositories, and
even gnome-shell search integration after that. We've casually discussed
posting smaller topical articles.

Guides are getting updated too, of course. More writers make for better
docs, so if you want that for our users, please help write docs instead of
competing.

--Pete
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