About FAQ

[serval2412]

Hello,

By spending some time on #libreoffice IRC channel, I noticed that some same
questions were asked regularly.
So I thought about FAQ and searched for it and I found :
- http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/
which is a good introduction Faq but quite light for users.
- https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/FR/FAQ
which is quite interesting but in French (for me no problem, it's my native
language :-))

On https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation#FAQ, I read this :
The French Team created an FAQ which is being translated into English
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq

Now here are the questions :
- I want to add a new entry to the FAQ : should I add it in French part,
then it'll be translated by other people ? Or should I add it in English
Faq, perhaps both ?
- Should the FAQ be 1 big page (like English one) or several pages (like
French ones) ?
- Is the French Team "officialy" in charge of increasing FAQ then some
people translate in English ? I mean is there a synchronization for example
what about if there's a add in English, should French Team detect it and add
it translated in French Faq ?
- What about the other languages ?
- Could there be links (or 1 single link) to FAQ wiki pages from
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/ ?

More generally : there are info from libreoffice website and info from wiki,
it could be interesting to put more wiki links on libreoffice website.

Julien

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
No-one has asked about that ever before! lol.  I really like the French wiki/faq.  Just 1 person is translating it into English and he is rather busy with other crucial parts of the project.  So, almost none of it is done yet.

I guess the ideal answer, given what we have at the moment, would be to add your new entries to the French one?  That might help avoid confusion about which pages have to be translated the other way.  It would be fantastic if you could translate a few of the more frequent faqs, or just any of them really!

I was not sure whether to use FAQ or Faq in the url.  I felt that FAQ was a bit "shout"y and the documentation team at the time didn't disagree because they were busy with other things.  Using Faq keeps it more consistent with urls in the rest of the documentation wiki eg
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/UserProfile
Spaces in names would mean lots of confusing %20's appearing in addresses which is messy, far from transparent and ugly imo.  Writingeverythingasonelongwordwithnobreaksisalsoquitetrickytoreadimo so i settled on CamelCase
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase
AsCamelCaseSeemsToBeEasierForPeopleToReadAsWellAsMakingLinkingEasier

So i guess what i am saying is that the English Faq is still up for grabs and ripe for changes.  If it does become useful then it might be worth linking to from the official website
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/
but at the moment it would be really bad to point people at the empty framework that lacks any content and pointing people to the excellent French one would probably create complaints.

It is fantastic to see someone interested! :)  If you need a hand with formatting wiki-pages or want ideas about layout or even just trivial questions about wiki-markup then please feel free to ask.  Some people just plonk good content with little or no formatting and that is fine too as other people can do the formatting quite happily.

If you don't have time to do more than add a few things then even that would still be very much appreciated.
Regards from
Tom

[iplaw67]

Hi Julien,

On https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation#FAQ, I read this :
The French Team created an FAQ which is being translated into English
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq

Yes, that was Tom, I think that put that there, in response to my taking the tree of the French FAQ with the intention of translating it into English. Unfortunately, work commitments got in the way, and I haven't managed to get any further as yet.

Now here are the questions :
- I want to add a new entry to the FAQ : should I add it in French part,
then it'll be translated by other people ? Or should I add it in English
Faq, perhaps both ?

As far as I'm concerned, both.

- Should the FAQ be 1 big page (like English one) or several pages (like
French ones) ?

Like I said above, there should already be a skeleton structure in the English FAQ, which I copied over from the French FAQ (but I haven't checked in a while, so things might have changed).

- Is the French Team "officialy" in charge of increasing FAQ then some
people translate in English ? I mean is there a synchronization for example
what about if there's a add in English, should French Team detect it and add
it translated in French Faq ?

No, there was nothing official, as far as I know, it was just me being fed up of there being nothing equivalent to what I found was a rather good French approach, and so the easiest thing in my mind was to translate the French FAQ into English (adapting where necessary).

- What about the other languages ?

No idea. There doesn't seem to be much synchronisation between the various N-L groups, but that was what each group wanted originally.

- Could there be links (or 1 single link) to FAQ wiki pages from
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/faq/ ?

The Silverstripe engine originally had an automatic translation feature, but it was decided early on not to use it (I don't really understand by whom or how that decision was made, or whether it just "happened"). One of the problems, so I understood, was linked to the Virtual Domain linking of such translated pages (i.e. they were not visible to others outside of the project space in which they had been created, it was all somewhat over my head).

Alex