User Guide Priorities for FAD

[Matthew Daniels]

At the FAD this Friday, a group will be working on editing the User
Guide.  This is a great opportunity to get a lot done for the UG, so
it's important that we outline some priorities on what needs to be
done.

Currently, the F9 guide is virtually done and we've starting working
on the F10 version.  You may have seen Kirk's work on the
Communication page which is the beginning of our F10 update.  This
Friday, then, all UG work will basically be for the F10 guide unless
someone sees a good reason why that wouldn't make sense.

(*) One big move I'd think would be good for the F10 guide is to start
cleaning up pages so that procedures are standardized.  This would
mean, for example, having one very good description about how to
install a package that can be referenced for every installation
instruction instead of having 12 different versions of this
description which are difficult to maintain.  Increasing the
maintainability of the guide will mean that we have more time to work
on expanding content and cleaning up style, which is a compromise I'm
willing to make for the loss of some inline convenience.

The priorities for this Friday, then, can be split into categories.  I
really don't see any clear priorities for content; I would suggest
avoiding the Introduction, perhaps, but besides that all content has a
pretty equivalent need to be written.  It may be wise to do the more
fundamental pages first; for example, writing the desktop tours, the
installing software page, and connecting to the internet would give a
better foundation for writing other pages.

Separately, the style of our pages can be userfriendlified.  Grammar,
fact, and typo checks are easy, but it would be good to have some
people go through and look for bias, unqualified jargon, and
unnecessary presumptions to be cleaned up.

We can also have people brainstorming and drawing out how we can work
out what I mentioned in the starred paragraph above.  Finally, if we
have more experienced contributers there, the F9 can be XML-ified.
This has been done partially, but I don't think it's been finished.

Please, fellow Fedorans, give me feedback!

-Matthew

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