Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs

[Chris Murphy]

My 2 cents.

I'm a technical writer, and two publishers required I use Microsoft Word. They wouldn't accept any other format. So I'm used to subjective technical requirements. But then "magic" happened to get that document converted and reformatted even though a template was used. The final production was done in some other application.

If there were a way to submit new documents as text, and have them converted and edited by a mentor/editor, who is needed anyway to edit and mark up this new content to make sure it meets various requirements, this probably would get more people to participate rather than having to learn native format tools. At least we get the content, assuming the goal is to acquire new content.

If the goal is to update existing documentation, then learning some aspect of native tools is inevitably necessary I think. And a step by step guide with maybe some screen casts, would be useful to learn all steps needed to successfully edit existing documentation.

So what are the goals? There's a lot of very good documentation already, although in some cases there's some fairly verbose prose, which must be difficult to translate, and more difficult to keep up to date. It's a daunting task to just dive in and start chopping up someone else's hard work though, even if that's the right thing to do. I'm used to being ruthless when editing other people's work, and unoffended when I get back work a majority of which has been marked up for edits. I don't know if that's a possible barrier (real or imagined).

Since I'm unfamiliar with the process of editing things, I've just been filing bugs citing the problem and suggested fixes, with supporting documentation when necessary.


Chris Murphy