Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs

[Pete Travis]

On 11/11/2013 06:22 PM, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
>  Hi Pete
> Your blog below was quite appropriate.  I work in aerospace and do a
> fair amount
> of writing and software development.  The editing department here is
> also a translation
> department as the company is a global one, dealing with Chinese,
> Indian dialects, French, Spanish,
> and a slew of UN national languages.  The translators want paragraphs
> of text. The English editor wants
> text delivered double spaced 12 size font, with revision management
> enabled and comments enabled. 
> The company uses MS word, but Libreoffice, (for Fedora's purpose),
> would suffice.
>
> By allowing authors to use Libreoffice, along with Libreoffice's
> revision management, I believe that a quality
> product and a more easily and accurately translated source would be
> generated.
>
> Regarding installations, and expositories,  there are varying levels
> of expertise as Fedora users. Many users,
> from my use of  forums is that they are more frequented by are
> beginners. They want a working Fedora distribution,
> so that they may use the tools that are included. (from workbenches,
> to business software).  I would say that the
> more experienced individuals do not frequent the forums too often, as
> "they know it all, and what can they learn?"
>
> Your ideas are great, I fully agree with them, but "when the only tool
> you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
> My view is that the tool you are using, with po files, is great for
> application code messages. It misses something when
> used as the documentation preparation tool.
>
> Can you please try this experiment. Are you able to ask an author to
> write his stuff with Libreoffice, and then turn on revision managment
> to  send out his work for comments and feedback. Lets see how that
> works. I would even take a page or two of text, if it is handed to me
> that way.
>
> Libreoffice is not a barrier, since is is ubiquitous.
> Regards
>
> Leslie
>
>

I don't know how to tell you any harder that Transifex is *NOT* an
automated machine translation service. It has the ability to use
external machine translation, but the Fedora Project does not use this
ability. There are real people reading these strings and translating
them into their native languages.  If you want to improve translations,
you should contribute translations. The localization workflow is not
broken, and the tools are excellent.

Emailing LibreOffice back and forth is certainly more efficient than the
mailing of physical paper that the workflow is modeled after. It is
*not* an improvement over an actual distributed version control system. 
As I've said before, use whatever editor you like - as long as the
markup is correct and the files are saved in plain text.

When I'm talking about "lowering participation barriers", I'm thinking
that most people with active FAS accounts know how to use git, are
familiar or can easily become familiar with ReStructuredText or
Markdown, and occasionally can take 15 minutes to write up a post.  I'm
not talking about restructuring everyone's workflow to suit your
preference or enabling your criticism of translations. Please don't turn
this discussion into a monologue of your storied past followed by
insistence that we adopt a different and labor-intensive workflow
because you aren't willing to learn what we already to. That topic has
already been discussed enough.

-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize at fedoraproject.org

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