[Qgis-psc] Documentation work

[DelazJ]

Hi Paolo

2017-01-09 14:43 GMT+01:00 Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>:

> Hi Harrissou,
> thanks for your thoughts. My comments inline.
>
> Il 09/01/2017 13:37, DelazJ ha scritto:
>
> > For the writing side, I naively thought in the past that the main
> > barrier for contributors was the lack of precise instructions/how-tos
> > (it could have been for me) but despite our efforts to build guidelines
> > more descriptive and complete (with step-by-steps), few new contributors
> > joined us and they were very brief.
>
> I hope not to be too provocative, but I start wondering whether this
> lack of interest reflects a relative little usage of the documentation.
>

This was a subject of a message I've written in the community ML and that I
didn't finally send because I found it too provocative (!) and I had
nothing else to propose. There might be some truth in it.... there are many
subjects on User ML that are already documented...
That reminds me Gary Sherman blog post ***Making open source easier*** (
http://spatialgalaxy.net/2006/07/12/making-open-source-gis-easier/) that
ends with : "*Of course item 4 that is not on the list is to get the users
to read the documentation. But that is a topic for another day*." I'm
looking for this next chapter... Anyone knows where i can find it?

However I don't always expect writers to be readers!


> After all, these days there is still lots of people really reading a
> long manual? Maybe most users want just about the same information ready
> at hand, with an help button close to the functions they are using. So
> the efforts by Richard and others to have a complete help system within
> the application could be a more fruitful approach?
>

I think and I hope it's. But if we do not have writers to improve the
content, we'll end up with the status that was the Context help one few
years ago: OUTDATED, hence useless.


> Of course, the content is essentially the same, it's just the accession
> method which could be more immediately useful, and possibly attracting
> more writers (e.g. by adding a link "Documentation missing? Write your
> own").
> But perhaps I'm wrong, and we should be more traditional.
>

> The Training Manual: this one is an useful document for beginners but
> > was written for QGIS 2.0 (?). It has got some fixes since, but also has
> > a bunch of issue reports that are not easy to tackle imho if you are not
> > the author nor had followed the exercices (which is my case but i might
> > not be alone among writers). I can't tell how closer it's currently with
> > recent releases but I wonder what it'll be with QGIS 3 (e.g., some
> > plugins/tools described in the manual like SPIT or Raster Terrain
> > Analysis have been removed in recent months... and could require some
> > exercices to be reorganized)
>
> I can take care of the Processing part of the Training Manual (I am
> doing it already, as the opportunity arises, and I can do it in a more
> structured way).
>
> Thanks.

Regards,
H.

> All the best.
>
> --
> Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
> QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
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