[Bf-docboard] Being involved In documentation

[Fluff Rabbit]

I don't know why people should have to jump through hoops to get
"approved".

As Campbell said:

>However the low-barrier-of-entry didn't make the wiki a success either
(we talked about this when proposing the new system).

sonichu.com is a huge success in the effort to document the life of
Christian Weston Chandler, and that is an area of much lower interest
than Blender. I don't think the issue is that people didn't contribute
enough [to blenderwiki] but that they contributed too much (in the eyes
of those who seem to prefer to talk about things behind closed doors).
This "no shirt, no shoes, no service" attitude shits all over the
free-loving software movement.

Also, I have a conspiracy theory: You BF guys want to raise funds, so
you cripple the wiki in an effort to sell your tutorials. Since this
roughly coincides with Blender Cloud, I think it's very plausible. Of
course, you don't answer to the community so it doesn't make any
difference what people say.

[I think I accidentally sent this message to playadance separately. 
Sorry.]

-----Original Message-----
From: Abuelo S. B. Chdancer <playadance at gmail.com>
To: Blender Documentation Project <bf-docboard at blender.org>
Sent: Tue, Jan 13, 2015 4:33 pm
Subject: Re: [Bf-docboard] Being involved In documentation

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
&lt;nkansahrexford at gmail.com&gt; 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
&lt;playadance at gmail.com&gt; 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
locallyCheckout 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 | Africa Center | WiR | WikiAfrica | User:Nkansahrexford



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