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

Hi Donald,

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Donald Rogers <donr2648@clear.net.nz> wrote:
> It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We 
> have at least the following:
>
> LO Help from the Help menu
> help.libreoffice.org

Those are identical. That's the whole point of help.libreoffice.org

> wiki.documentfoundation.org

this is more developer / active contributer oriented and less for
endusers, although stuff is published there. But there's another
discussion (or actually in this thread, I lost track) about not
"abusing" wiki to publish large files, etc.

> the guides
> FAQ

How can these be extra points when these are hosted on the mentioned sites?

> ask.libreoffice.org

A user-helps-user platform, no static documentation, but
answeres/solutions for specific problems. You cannot cover every
cornercase in regular documentation.

> accessibility info
> features

See above, not really belong here as separate points, as they are
found on sites. Otherwise you could just make separate bulletpoints
for whetever you like.
But the new-features page surely is also a marketing tool.

> installation instructions

Nobody reads those anyway :-) But what is wrong with having those?

> mailing lists

similar to ask.libreoffice.org, but most mailinglists are for
coordination of active contributors. And while ask.libreoffice.org is
fine for easy problems, more complex ones are better off on the maiing
list.

> Nabble

That's just an interface to the mailinglists. Not everybody likes
using their mailclient. And you forgot gmane/newsgroup interface, that
also is an additional way to access/participate in the mailing lists.

> IRC

(near) real-time discussion - so again a different scope, useful for
different stuff than the other ways to get help.

You did happily mix passive sources of information with interactive stuff...

> The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but 
> also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be a 
> huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.

The principles of usage are the same, so no big deal really... And
whether you do the screen shots or not is also a matter of taste...
But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
to the "gladification" of the UI.

> If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone 
> write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used 
> for the Help menu help?

That was already answered help.libreoffice.org is what is in the help-module.

> What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?

See above. I see it mainly as a source for information for active
contributors/developers, less so for the enduser.

> Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized 
> too?

well, apart from people monitoring what kind of questions get asked
the most on ask.libreoffice.org, there is no synergy. Questions are
too widespread/too special in most cases.

> LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone 
> all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with 
> even one of the help systems.


Please explain / give an example what you are talking about here. I
hate statements like that.

> The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.

What CMS please. There are tons of them.

ciao
Christian

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