[Bf-docboard] Wiki and Unification

[Glen Moyes]

Since we are making a significant change to the documentation project by using a wiki, I think it's a good time to bring up some other ideas on how we can improve the documentation, in more ways than just ease of contributing.

One thing I've always wanted the documentation to be is a resource where you can find the official documentation on a subject, and at the same time be provided with different resources like video tutorials, web tutorials, and demo files, all on the same page, essentially making it the one-stop source for all Blender knowledge. All we really need to do is add a section at the bottom of each entry in the documentation for links to those kinds of learning resources. It's that simple, but very beneficial for the user.

The idea behind this is unification. One thing that each blender.org visitor has in common when they are looking for the documentation, the video tutorial collection, or web tutorials on blender.org, is that they want to learn. And I am convinced that people are more interested in *what* they learn rather than *how* they learn it. That being the case, it makes more  sense to simply have all educational information in one place, organized by topic. That would be an incredibly valuable resource, and not much different than what we are doing now.

So, instead of making the wiki simply for the documentation, why don't we make it the wiki for all educational resources for Blender? I know it's tapping into a little bit of what the web team currently does, like maintaining the tutorial sections, but when you consider those tasks compared to the documentation, we all have a unified purpose; teaching people how to use the software. So why not unify all those resources into one place, and have it organized along with the documentation? It just makes more sense, and would be very easy to do.

I, for one, can say that my life would be a lot easier if I could update the video tutorial collection on a wiki. I'm not saying Typo3 is hard to use. A wiki is just easier than editing, previewing, making sure the cache is clear, publishing the page, etc. Plus, it would be easier for other people to contribute. But it would make even more sense to have the tutorial collections mingled with the documentation. Again, it's about unification.

I'd like to see what everyone else here thinks about it. The wiki decision is mainly to  benefit the writers, but I think we should also think about what ways it will benefit the users, in more ways than just having better documentation. I would really like to see all of the educational resources found in one place, sorted by topic, so people only have to look in one place, instead of jumping between different web pages and different sites to find as much as you can about a topic.

- Glen Moyes


		
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