[Qgis-community-team] Draft paper discussing QGIS docs

[Anita Graser]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 3:10 PM Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:

> But I wonder what prevents those people companies from ALSO contributing
> this valuable information, next to their own personal websites, to
> QGIS.ORG? Is the process or are the tools too complicated? I mean - if
> you spend 1-2 days about preparing and writing on your own blog post. Why
> not also spending the extra 1-2 hours for copy/pasting this same
> information also to the centralized QGIS.ORG documentation?
>
I tried (
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/pull/3769#event-2418479949) but
something is keeping me from doing it regularly.

Thinking about it, reasons for me include:

- It's not always possible to simply copy a blog post to the documentation.
The expected style (as in wording) of the text is different. The text
should fit into the bigger picture. This often means a significant rewrite.
- Maybe just me but: I'm always uncertain of how to add figures and links
correctly so that they are not broken in the built documentation.
- Lack of immediate feedback: When I post on a blog, the content is
immediately online and - as feedback comes in - it's possible to make
adjustments quickly. The above PR was open for a month. (There were a lot
of good discussions going on but it might feel more motivating to publish
more quickly and improve incrementally)

So the last two points come down to the process we currently have in place.
Coming from a platform (Wordpress) where I can immediately see and verify
the final results, the qgis.org documentation system makes me feel less
certain about the quality of my edits and it takes much longer until
corrections are visible online. (I know that I could build the
documentation locally on my machine. I've tried with Richard's help in the
past and failed to set it up on my machine.)

Regards,
Anita
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