Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site

Tom, I do not agree with you.

Slovenian team will not throw away the translated help nor will it
allow to throw away its translated help. We do not have a translated
user guide, but are working on it. And let me tell you, even the user
guide is not completely up-to-date.

Lp, m.

2013/2/14 Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk>:
> Hi :)
> > From what i can make out there has been almost no-one updating the in-built help in the last 8 
> > years or so!
>
> The requirement to understand Xml means that people whose skills are in producing good quality 
> documentation are unable to understand or work on the in-built help.  So if anyone has been 
> updating the in-built help then it's been people that understand coding well but not necessarily 
> grok the nuances of non-technical-human communication.
>
> Any translation teams that have done straight translations into their own languages now have very 
> out-dated in-built help packages.  In the past that has not been too much of a problem.  Sun 
> aimed for stability and tried to suppress innovation and new-feature development.  With 
> LibreOffice it is becoming a big problem.  Hopefully translators have been usign their own skills 
> as producers of good quality work to modify and add to the in-built help.  In which case we need 
> a translation back into English in order to update what we have.
>
> On the English User Support lists we have had lots of people grumble that they couldn't get 
> LibreOffice to work and that the in-built help was useless, inadequate or even blatantly wrong or 
> missing crucial features.  Many complained that it was typical of OpenSource that it had such bad 
> documentation and was a reason they would prefer to go back to MS.  Once pointed to the published 
> Guides they turned around completely, even ending up paying for guides published by the printing 
> service at Lulu and becoming advocates encouraging others to use LibreOffice.
>
> Wiki's are great but quickly become quite difficult to find your way around even for longer-term 
> users.  Also since they are often written by normal users instead of people skilled in producing 
> good quality documentation we again run into difficulties.  Also it requires that people 
> understand wiki-editing more than they understand how to write well.
>
>
> So i think that if we want good quality documentation then the focus for translators really needs 
> to be on the published Guides.
>
> Notice that those published guides are generating a small profit for the documentation team.  
> Even though the guides are available for free from many sources people have still made a big 
> effort to buy the professionally printed guides from the store at Lulu.  That happens enough that 
> the docs team can more than cover the costs of getting the guides into other stores and a bit 
> more for contingencies and other sundry costs.
>
> More importantly people see attractively and professionally printed guides in various place and 
> that spreads the word about LibreOffice more.
>
>
> So i think it's important to stop placing such high priority on translating the in-built 
> (outdated) help and make more of a push into translating the published guides.
>
> Regards from
> Tom :)
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > ________________________________
> > From: Zeki Bildirici <zeki@ozgurlukicin.com>
> > To: website@global.libreoffice.org
> > Cc: Jan Holesovsky <kendy@suse.cz>; michael.meeks@suse.com; LibreOffice-l10n 
> > <l10n@global.libreoffice.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, 13 February 2013, 22:13
> > Subject: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > As we all know LibreOffice help is served in two ways; the locally
> > installed help package and online help at help.libreoffice.org. I
> > think we all accept that this huge help content is not used/preferred
> > by users. Personally i think that a huge percent of users even don't
> > know these resources.
> >
> > Like ordinary computer users, we always start searching help from
> > Google. That should be accepted the usual and normal habit.
> >
> > I think we can improve the usage of the help with improving the
> > existence of help and changing the habits of the users.
> >
> > Currently online help wiki hosts 21 languages, which have almost
> > completed help translations. But i think it is not enough for all this
> > localization effort.
> >
> > LibreOffice gives great importance on localization, and why we serve
> > less than this? There are 39 languages translated the help over %70.
> > This means a lot, and more for the users of this language. 18 language
> > will bring thousand of opportunities to get help, and fight discourage
> > about LibreOffice.
> >
> > Not all of our local communities has a network, forum or other
> > platforms to serve and share the knowledge. Help content is a golden
> > mine for us. For example, we established our Turkish forum and we have
> > only a little info there, so Google cannot serve the answers from us,
> > but if our help content was uploaded, everything will be different.
> >
> > I have some ideas to make the help content more efficient by changing
> > the habits of the users.
> >
> > - Adding more languages to the wiki (over %70 completion or %50 will be better)
> > - Adding sharing widgets to wiki pages, which we may share useful
> > stuff in social media. There are usefull widgets for wikimedia
> > http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Widgets_Catalog * Personnally i am
> > thinking pick usefull info and share as tip of day in my twitter and
> > Google+ as the tip of day etc regularly when our language is added to
> > the site.
> > - Adding an info bar to http://ask.libreoffice.org/ and inform users
> > about the help site, which is the first source of self learning and
> > solving problems
> > - Blogging about both online help site and embed help to increase the
> > awareness about this sites in our own language.
> > - When helping people, kindly notify them that they may have abundant
> > info from this help
> > - Improve the landing pages from the users which have not yet
> > installed the help package
> > - A little polish (We had some in our Turkish wiki:
> > http://wiki.libreoffice.org.tr/Ana_sayfa)
> >
> > Sharing, blogging and giving links to help site will also improve the
> > Google Pagerank(currently 5 while MS office help site has 8) and that
> > will result better search resources.
> >
> > We spent hours for creating and translating this help, whatever it is
> > thought to be very very outdated(i don't agree) as i said it has all
> > the stuff and it is a gold mine. We may serve and use it better i
> > think.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Zeki
> >
> > PS: Michael, thats my ping for Kendy :)
> >
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