how can I help?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 03:28:18PM -0400, Ricky Zhou wrote:
> On 2009-07-20 12:02:16 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > I hate to be a stop-energy-spreader, but I'm not a big fan of the 'ten
> > thousand tiny pages' school of documentation. It winds up with two major
> > drawbacks: you can't ever find anything, and nothing gets updated.
> > (Visit the Gentoo wiki to observe both in operation).
> I think prioritizing documentation can help with this.  For example,
> a list of wiki pages/things that absolutely most be updated every
> release (does anything like this currently exist?)
> 
> I hate to keep picking on these few points, and this is not meant to put
> down our docs in any way, but I think the issue of
> 
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f11/en-US/html/
> 
> vs.
> 
> http://en.opensuse.org/INSTALL_Local
> http://en.opensuse.org/Installation/11.1_Live_CD
> 
> is a very serious one.  Our organized, comprehensive docs definitely
> have their place, but the unfortunate fact is that some new users will
> be scared off by the table of contents alone.  This is where specific,
> task-based documentation (with an eye towards the defaults) is very useful.

How much could we avoid that scare by tuning the table of contents to
look more like what you see in the corner of a yelp screen?  I.e.,
chapter titles only, with a more detailed listing at the beginning of
the chapter itself?  This doesn't solve everything, but incremental
steps help.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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