Documentation: open user invitation to help out

[Geert Janssens]

We just had a lengthy thread on report customization. Some of you may have 
followed it, other may not.

One of the things in this discussion that caught my attention was that reports 
are hard because of a lack of documentation. This is not only for reports, 
this is true for several areas in GnuCash.

So this is a general request to users (and developers who are usually users as 
well), to help and improve the documentation.

This is not hard to do. All of you can help out at some level. It only takes a 
little of your time.

Here are some examples of how you can help out:

1. You had a particular question that wasn't addressed in the documentation. 
You did manage to solve your question, either by yourself (clever you !) or 
with some help on the mailing list or irc channel.

How to help:
-> Write down what your question was and what the solution was, in a form that 
can be understood easily by others that might have the same question.
-> Submit your write-up to the user mailing list, and I'll gladly add it to 
the gnucash wiki [1] or documentation, depending on where it fits best. If you 
send it to the list, put something like "GnuCash tip" or something in the 
subject, that makes it easier to recognize.

-> Or if you want to help a little more, write your question and solution in 
the gnucash wiki yourself. That costs you a little more time and saves me a 
little more.

2. If you like, you can also help us manage the wiki [1]: improve/update its 
contents and structure, add new contents, extract solutions from mailing list 
discussions and put them in the wiki,... You can spend as little or as much 
time on this as you like.

3. Or if you feel even more engaged, you can also help us improve/complete the 
Concepts guide [2] and GnuCash manual [3]. There are large parts of new 
functionality that are not or poorly documented (reporting is one of them, 
business functions another,...). You don't need coding skills for this, just 
time and preferably some writing skills.


Bottom line is, for me GnuCash is not just a program, it's a community of 
users. (Again I include developers as users here). We can all contribute to 
improve the GnuCash experience. People with coding skills can improve the 
code, people with writing skills can improve the documentation, people with 
real world experience with the program can share their experience (by the way 
a thank you goes out here to all of you helping on the mailing list and irc 
channels). All of these contributions are for the benefit of all other users.

Help is welcome in all areas. However, I think the documentation is currently 
lagging behind on the code so it would be good if this area could get some 
extra attention. Most people don't realize they can help out in this area 
relatively easily.

So here you go: you are all cordially invited to contribute your personal 
GnuCash experience with all of us. All of us will thank you for it !

Geert

[1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/GnuCash
[2] http://svn.gnucash.org/docs/guide/
[3] http://svn.gnucash.org/docs/help/help.html