[Bf-docboard] Being involved In documentation

[Abuelo S. B. Chdancer]

Hi to Nkansah Rexford,

A contributor should be able to go to a normal webpage.

Register what he would be interested in doing.

Be contacted by a real human who agrees the task.

The writer should be able to submit using email or a simple web based
upload form. For the text.

If approved by an editor or by peer review the more complicated task of
adding illustrations can be handle by some method.



On 14 January 2015 at 00:47, Nkansah Rexford <nkansahrexford at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello Chdancer,
>
> I think you have a point, and its from a user who's got no idea what those
> terms are.
>
> However, look at it this way too. Trying to explain every single detail of
> the steps will require another documentation on its own. "What repo is?",
> "How to clone", "What is reST?", svn (what is even version control? duh!),
> checkout (what am I buying?), pip, requirements.txt and so on.
>
> Those are stuffs with detailed documentations on their own found
> everywhere on the net. I don't think the getting started page on Blender
> should aggregate all these information and present it to anyone who
> actually wants to get started (beside's that'll be aggregating
> documentations into a documentation).
>
> Of course, more flesh can (and likely will) be added to those getting
> started pages, but remember not *everything *can be covered or all the
> terminologies can be expounded.
>
> I think explaining every single thing on that page defeats the whole idea
> of 'getting started'. Its not a training course. Its to get you started, so
> they're pointers, offering guidance as to how to go about it.
>
> Therefore, I think as someone who really wants to get started, doing a bit
> more googling and reading outside the getting started page should make
> things happen much easier, for both authors of get started pages and also
> the 'get-startee' (bad english, but hope you get it)
>
> I know its hard to understand pages like that, but I hope it gets improved
> to the best possible to bridge the gap between devs and users.
>
> rex
>
> On Tuesday, January 13, 2015, Abuelo S. B. Chdancer <playadance at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Campbell Barton reminded...
>>
>> "While this is subjective, we have had contributions submitted via our
>> project page:
>>
>> https://developer.blender.org/tag/documentation/ "
>>
>>
>> Guys, someone who USES Blender may not know the first thing about coding,
>> someone who can write simple prose explaining to another person in clear
>> language how to DO something artistic may be totally useless when it comes
>> to installing software or plugging in a USB plug.
>>
>> I bet a lot of possible contributors give up when they read this....
>>
>> "We have migrated the content over to reST format, so that the manual
>> can be built with Sphinx. A good amount of work is still required to
>> complete the migration (learn more about the open tasks in Phabricator).
>>
>> If you want to start contributing or want to have a look at the new
>> manual, here we have some instructions.
>> How to build the docs locally
>>
>>    - Checkout the Subversion repository svn checkout
>>    https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-manual/trunk
>>    - Move to the location where the repo was cloned
>>    - Run pip install -r requirements.txt (Windows user make sure you are
>>    using Python 2.7, not 3.x)
>>    - Build a section of the manual (for example make render)
>>    - Launch the contents_quicky.html inside of the html folder and
>>    browse the freshly build render docs
>>
>>
>> That is a hundred times worse than trying to  use the wiki manual. It is
>> mindboggingly offputting and not just incomprehensible but presents such a
>> hurdle that most people will stop at that point and forget being involved.
>>
>> What it should say is.....
>>
>> Read this (hopefully well written and elegantly presented) webpage which
>> explains how you register what you would like to do.
>>
>> If worried about 'no nothings' writing drivel, that is why we invented
>> human editors. Also it is technically possible to have peer reviews of
>> submitted entries prior to making the entry official.
>>
>> I was in the middle of working on my latest animation.....
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> +Rexford <http://google.com/+Nkansahrexford> | Africa Center
> <http://africacenter.net> | WiR
> <https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence> | WikiAfrica
> <http://wikiafrica.net> | User:Nkansahrexford
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nkansahrexford>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-docboard mailing list
> Bf-docboard at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-docboard
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-docboard/attachments/20150114/e909036a/attachment.htm