[Typo3-doc] Wiki people: who's on board now?

[Peter Kindström]

Hi,
>> * There has to be some guidelines about working with / in the
>> wiki. Like how to use the Discussion tab, versioning etc
>> But I don´t thing these guideline will come from the "top
>> management" guys. Unless noone can persuade them...
>>
> I sort of get the impression they don't see a fundamental problem, and
> so are leaving the details up to whoever is in charge at the time. I say
> write/revise any current guidelines and proceed as though that's the
> real deal until someone complains. You can only solicit feedback for
> just so long before you realise the project is going nowhere. :)

But my problem was this "process .. until someone complains". I
felt like I was all alone, so if just one person disagreed all
my job was undone.  :-(

I think you have better conditions, right now. You have more
people supporting this work, the issue has been prepared /
discussed and maybe the "top managements" are ready to support
this (after the discussions in the "The Right Crew" thread).


>> * My idea was to "integrate" the wiki and typo3.org
>> documentation pages in some way. First by having the same
>> structure and second by starting to link between them.
>>
> Well, I think the "manual-only" nature of the wiki (no
> automatically-updating menus, for example) will always make it hard to
> make it a permanent final destination for documentation. As a developer
> tool, it meets the need of easy editability and a linear page structure,
> but when you have multiple cross-linked pages, not having a good
> navigation structure can be a hindrance.

Yes, that's why we said the wiki is just a workspace!
But I think the most important thing is to have a good and
logical structure. And the same structure on typo3.org as on the
wiki. That could be an (easy?) step towards a unified way of
managing documentation (like your suggestion with the
documentation framework).


>> * Good documentation is important for users. And we have a lot
>> of it! It "just" has to be organised (both inside/between
>> documents and as a whole) and managed in a good way.
>> (Example: You find information about how to enable the admin
>> panel in three different documents - all have a little bit
>> different information!)
>>
> Yes, yes, yes! There is an amazing amount of information, but it was
> posted even today on another mailing list that when compared to other
> CMSes, the documentation was the major criticism. The work that everyone
> has all done so far deserves more respect than that, and what I hope is
> that we can consolidate, review and present it in such a way that we get
> no criticism for it. Often the criticism is of the "this info isn't
> available" nature, even when it's been available for 3 years! The real
> criticism is "this info can't be found".


That is true!
But what are you/we going to do about it? How do we make it
easier to find the information? Note that I wrote "information"
not "documents", because I think this is the problem: People can
easily find *a lot* of documents, but they still don´t find the
information they look for!

My idea is that this is mostly a structuring problem. Documents
contain information that you don´t expect (like this excellent
newbie explanation about the BE interface in "Inside Typo3"
under the header "Core Architecture"). And other documents does
not containg what you expect (none of TSConfig, TSRef or TS by
example contains any basic explanation about TS).

This is just examples (maybe not that good) but I think they
point out one key issue: We have to organise / structure
documents better to help people find what they want. This is of
course a huge task, but in the long run IMHO it is necessary to do!


Regards,
Peter Kindström