wiki try at gnomesupport.org

[deane at mjollnir.gooroos.com]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:24:02AM -0300, Jon Lapham wrote:
> 
> I'm a bit conflicted over whether I like the idea of a wiki or not.  On 
> one hand, it is great in that people can easily contribute.  On the 
> other hand, it is Yet Another Place for Documentation.

I don't much like wikis myself as any that I've seen are confusing places
with too little organization.  HOWEVER, they do encourage contributions
from those who otherwise might not, either because they provide instant
feedback (e.g. the user can *see* zir change on the wiki right away and can
point others to it, rather than waiting for it to be reviewed, melded into
the official docs, then release) or because of the ego-boost they get,
since their name is attached to that particular change.

So for those reasons alone I would support a GnuCash wiki.

> I guess I can use the wiki as a place to harvest information to put in 
> the documentation, kind of like what I do now with the user- mailing 
> list archives, the devel- ML archives, the v1.6 docs, IRC, external 
> HOWTOs, etc, etc, ....

Yes, I think that's the way to go about it.

> I'm just imagining people in the mailing list answering "oh, you should 
> look at the GnuCash wiki...", or "use the XXX business guide", or "I saw 
> a thread on that the other day", or "I remember that in the old docs", 
> or etc.  Ugh, what an nightmare.  I like the idea of a central 
> repository with *everything*.

That might be nice, but you'll never get that.  You'll never even get
*close* to that.  As GnuCash's popularity increases, alternative web-sites
will spring up with their own forums in which questions get asked and
answered.  Alternative mailing lists will spring up.  People will write
their own HOWTOs and tutorials, reflecting their own personal viewpoints or
the needs of a particular sub-group of users.

A lot of it is simply a matter of community.  People are more comfortable
asking questions in communities with which they are familiar.  So a dentist
wanting to use GnuCash in zir practice is quite likely to ask on the dental
software forum he visits on a daily basis long before zie will post a
message to gnucash-users.

So I think that the goal of the "official" documentation should be that
it's *authoritative*.  That is, that it covers all of the features in an
easily accessible way.  It shouldn't try to be all things to all people,
since that would be impossible to achieve.

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