RTFM? How To Write a Manual Worth Reading

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Rich Bowen's insightful, detail laden piece at Opensource.com about improving documentation: Have you noticed that the more frequently a particular open source community tells you to RTFM, the worse the FM is likely to be? I've been contemplating this for years, and have concluded that this is because patience and empathy are the basis of good documentation, much as they are the basis for being a decent person. What's the best example you know of for open-source documentation? How about the worst?

Comments

Story time, my method.

[pecosdave]

So years ago I was in varying positions at an ISP, but regardless of title "head tech" pretty much applied. We kept getting kids right out of high school that claimed to know computers well but had never used a command line, didn't know what an IRQ was etc.. As this was the Windows 95/98 era and this was a dial-up ISP some manuals had to be written.

I of course wrote them.

I made flow charts for email troubleshooting (I hated Visio so I used a graphical editor instead), I had grids for IRQ/Address settings, I had step by steps for undoing AOL I.P. stack sabotage (how many of you remember that?) Fact was I wrote really good documentation that anyone from teenager to adult could use to troubleshoot the "normal" day to day issues a worker at an ISP faces without making a condescending script. If you used it for reference it was an answer key, if you read every word you often would know why that problem occurred. I'm of the belief understanding an issue is always better than just knowing what the fix is.

Long story short - the documents leaked out of the company. On the north side of town there was a help-desk outsourcing company that tended to have a lot of employee migration with our own - in both directions. A buddy of mine went to work at a different ISP and saw my documents turn up there with my name replaced on the credit line (he knew I wrote them - he watched and knew the marks I put in things that were dead giveaways it was my stuff).

I no longer worked at the old company and was still finding out about my documents leaking all over the damned place. I decided to put the documentation GPL on the things and throw them out on my webserver. If figured if I put them out on the web myself then there was a verifiable copy out in the wild, it would shine a light on the plagiarizers, and I was hoping to maybe get offered jobs or something. Later I was criticized with "that really should have been Creative Commons". Fuck you, I did this before Creative Commons even existed.

My web server and the backups were physically stolen from my home, but there's still an archive. To this day I still write in the "explain it, don't step it" method.

Turns out lots of places want idiot guides and don't care to understand.