[Bf-docboard] About the last e-mails received in the bf-docboard list.

[Ivan Paulos Tomé]

Hi friends, how are you ?

I'm Ivan Paulos Tomé - A.K.A. Greylica.
After 2 years maintaining Brazilian Wiki project ( near complete ),
I have learned lot's of lessons...

OK, I tried to avoid a long mail, but some issues are inevitable,
I cannot avoid bringing them up, so let's get to it.


1-) Documentation:

All of us, no matter our native language/country, need access to (good)
documentation for Blender. Our Blender Wiki is intended to bring the best
information possible to users, but it's not guided towards "newbies". That
is the cause we have been receiving complaints about the Wiki nowadays, just
as in 2009, and 2008, and 2007... The same thing is always happening.

Why this is happening almost every year ?

I can tell you what's happening, because it's not us exclusively. No, it's
not Blender Foundation, and it's not documenters/users fault. The same
situation is happening to the entire Free/Open Software ecosystem, same for
Gimp, Inkscape, same for OO, same for any Free Software !

Users complain because they desperately seek for a magic solution. A
quick-and-easy piece of information that will solve their problems. A
miracle, to be exact. But there is no miracle here, no one will make a film
in one day...

((It's the truth, even for me, 4 years using Blender, I will have to work
everyday for a production, If I want to...))

Sometimes people get ''brilliant'' ideas, and try to solve all of our
problems with proposals that implement a non traditional way of learning
Blender. Is it right to do so? Yes !!!

But in every try, they discover that the real world is not so kind, users
aren't so easy, and things sometimes don't work as expected. Until now, no
one found an useful and complete solution for all of our (mostly related to
"newbies") problems, but please, keep trying !

A group of Brazilians for example, are starting to use BGE to teach Blender,
why not ?

The advantage over videos: You can translate and fix things...

Let's talk about the REAL problem, including Andrew Price's presentation:

What Andrew Price said in his presentation, is what we already knew years
ago.

But how do we solve it ?

Before any ideas pop in this area, we need to address the "newbies" issue:
often times, me, Luca, Jester, Terry, and some other ACTIVE documenters
discussed them. Even Ton Rosendaal entered the discussions/conversations
with us.

Keep in mind that the ''User manual'' is not a ''Newbie manual'', and that
was written in a way that tries to reach a hand over both worlds,
experienced and non-experienced. But the "newbies" are always complaining:

''Huh, I read the entire Wiki page only to find out that the Faces that I
was using had it's normals pointed in the wrong direction. Why wasn't it
blinking in red, white and black in front of the Blender.org website ?''
(and offer a cup of tea too ?)

Do we have to express this problem in a more stressful situation ? No. We
don't.

(We already know the solution, but people are always complaining. Why aren't
they documenting using the Blender Wiki Writers manual or guidelines? Why
they insist in complaints whereas we need task force to guide?)

Often times we receive certain e-mails and complaints in the list
bf-docboard, offering the ''ultimate super ultra solution''. None of them
offered real help, most of them never wrote a technical article, and most of
them never wrote a single useful tutorial.

Then again, they are offering video tutorials to solve our problem.
Seriously ?

We are giving our blood to the cause: we lack sleep sometimes; we sometimes
stick 6 hours in front of a computer writing articles... and then, because
we aren't delivering the expected miracle for newbies (for now), suddenly
we're useless, archaic museum articles...

So much fingers pointed at us, and mere 5~14 trully concerned about the
quality of the information given to the readers. In fact, we are concerned
about the Blender User Experience quality, and our ''User Manual'' is the
result of hard study, consultancy of Blender Coders, conversations,
approval, only to now be considered useless?

Everything now is Video, video is modern! What then, shall we have to set
fire on books ?

No, videos are complimentary, what we need is to have the best of both
worlds, and we have plans to write exclusively for newbies. It will solve
their problems. We WILL give Blender to every human in the earth. I have no
problem adding ''complimentary'' videos...


 The solution to the most urgent problem, (to finally solve the "newbies"
issue) starts here:

Can you help ?

IRC #blenderwiki

It's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...

I swear that I will do the best I can to help, as the same was done for me 2
years ago.


 2-) Documenters:

Yes, I have ''chewed'' bad documenters, I didn't give them a third/fourth
chance to use ''Google Translate'' and upload pages, I corrected errors,
rolled back ''spam'' pages. All I am saying to everyone is that the coders
do not deserve bad documenters, they are working hard to deliver Blender
without a hiccup, why can't we work in the same spirit ?

I am saying that I'm a Blender maintainer, I take care of this part of
Blender, I'm responsible for the manuals, Brazilian Manual and Base
(English).

Expect me and my team ( it's being formed ) to be maintainers. Please, do
not treat us as ''only writers'' or ''only translators'' → forget it, we are
maintainers, we will be here 2014, 2020, 2030... Me, Samir, and Leandro will
be here for 2.6x. Brazilians are coming, good documenters, good coders, good
artists !

We need maintainers for the documentation, it means people that are
responsible for parts of the manual, we don't need ''documenters'' anymore
(often times a Blender writer...), we need maintainers, I'm forming
documenters that will be good maintainers, they deserve the same respect
they are showing the entire Blender ecosystem.


 3-) Translations :

English only ?

Someone told that Mont29 has spoken ideas to kill documentation in any other
language, right ?

It's very strange, because ''FR'', the French documentation (Sebastien is
French) is complete...

Brazilian (Portuguese) documentation is complete... (13 pages left )

Chinese documentation is ongoing (have you seen the logs ? )...

Kill their documentation, and you will have almost no documenters for
English either.

Let them working, and we'll have a task force to guide when needed. ;-)

The idea behind translations, is that the involved persons are also capable
of editing and

writing pages. Look at my situation right now:

I didn't say no to help with Base (English) documentation for 2.6x, and I
wrote/translate 99% of the Brazilian wiki entirely alone, 2 years of hard
work...

Documenters converted to maintainers of their languages, will be responsible
for FR, IT, PT, AR, RU, etc, etc. Good idea, don't you think ?

On top of that, Brazilian usage of Blender after having a manual in
portuguese is rising everyday. It's the first pillar for our future support
infrastructure. We are doing our best to encourage them to use Blender, wich
results in a Blender "ecosystem" growth. Personally, I don't want this
process to stop.


 I will do my best to see Blender everywhere on earth, why not?


 Is there any specific reason (personal or not) to stop it here or in other
countries ?

I won't leave translations, even for complimentary videos, do you know how
many countries do speak Portuguese ?

There are 8 countries, and 3 territories...


 Narayan said:

We can't plan with 3 people...

My answer:

   -

   Can you plan alone and make it happen ? Do it !

   For now, those three are making it happen right now...


4:) Sandbox :


 Censorship ? CENSORSHIP ?

Someone's got a drug that humans aren't aware of...

Archaic rules ?

OK, My sandbox is empty. Do you know why ?

That's because I didn't end the translation of BR Wiki, and because of this,
I didn't take my new responsibility to write and maintain – The
''Constraints'' Section task of 2.4x was given to me to renewal. I will use
my Sandbox, and I will use it a lot !

Samir; our new Brazilian documenter, is using his Sandbox, ask him how many
tips I gave him before placing the page in the appropriate local.

There's no censorship here, when submitting a page for approval, I felt even
more secure about my Job, Blender (ecosystem) deserves the best I can do !
The judgement and approval of others does not cause any restriction to my
liberty.


 5:) Video Standards:

OK, here I agree, the only thing good in all of this, it's the submission of
videos using certain standards to boot. Even then, it's a complimentary
thing, and we can add it into an specific section of every page. I agree to
put videos in wiki. Can we define standards for it? ((Maybe a revision of
the Style Guide is due?))

We will only need the screenplay, and captions in txt, pdf, whatever so we
can translate them!

A question:

Narayan said:

- Videos will dominate life in the future...

Well, stupid videos are dominating everything right now...

Roger said:

Videos are a simply an encapsulated manner of explaining things, and good
videos sometimes are hard to find...

Will the people that are insisting that videos will save Blender's
documentation issues, please be completely responsible for their quality and
join #blenderwiki channel?

It's very easy to submit ideas. To be responsible for them, develop and
maintain, now that's another story...

(Ops, same issue again, we need more maintainers...)


 6:) TOC changes.

I saw strong efforts to make it happen, I don't know the state of the thing
right now, but I have plenty of confidence in Luca, Jester and the rest of
the Team.

Once again: Ideas >working sample< Implementation.


 7:) Editing anything at any time, with any IP address.


 The wiki is a big book, I have to read the BR logs everyday to see if any
wrong changes occurred, and the Doc:BR and Doc: wiki is simply... Giant !!!

Wrong changes take place almost everyday. I've found lot's of ''Hello word
!'' in Brazilian Pages as well. In the beginning, it was hard to explain for
Brazilian newcomers of Wiki (sometimes I'm recruiting people to train, in
order to be become mantainers), that they need their hard work constantly
looked after. Some of them say that this is a very insecure way to construct
a big work, and leave as it is believing it's ok. It's hard for me sometimes
too, but I will continue observing it everyday. Any act of vandalism will be
reported/rolled back. But I confess, I'd prefer to see only registered users
editing wiki. It's better to know the e-mail of the registered users, and
try to orient them as well ( I won't admit vandalism of any kind ). The
information in our Blender Wiki is an image of our Blender efforts. The
software is serious/organized (I believe in Blender). Free software doesn't
mean disorganized software/infrastructure/ecosystem, and we are already far
better than this.

I know that this open situation is an incentive for users to enrich the
texts inside wiki, but in fact only a handfull of serious Blender users,
maintainers and coders are using their freedom to do it right. And they are
always registering themselves in wiki prior to editing, it's a proof of
their respect.

We HAVE to delete users like 111111111111111111111.1, 111111.2, etc... They
aren't serious.


 8:) Meetings! - First Sunday of every Month:

Let's do it !

Even if you can find me each and every day in the IRC wiki channel
(#blenderwiki), I won't miss it. Let Luca (mindrones), or Nathan Letwory
(Jesterking) tell us what's best for them, (best moment of the day, issues,
etc), and I will be there.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you all for reading, I appologise for the long mail again, thank you
all for the freedom to manifest my opinion.


 Now I'm getting back to the work, there are 2 new maintainers to train, 13
pages to end BR wiki, and in 8 feb 2011, I'm all for 2.6x series, body and
soul !


 Cheers !

Greylica – My Brain is Grey like yours !

Ivan Paulos Tomé,

BR Wiki Maintainer.

-- 
Drogas são coisas que não se pode nem se deve compartilhar.
Que tal compartilhar Linux ?
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