Write the Docs Helps Create FLOSS Software Documentation (Video)

Say hello to David Smatlak, who works with Write the Docs -- a group that started some years back as Read the Docs.They have conferences in the U.S.and Europe, and Meetups in over a dozen cities. It's a low-key group, open to both people who write documentation and developers who want help writing professeional-quality documentation for their Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Also welcome are those who would like to learn how to write good software documentation, starting with this online tutorial about the art and science of writing technical documentation. (And if you are interested primarily in Linux documentation, you'll want to check the Linux Documentation Project, too.)

Comments

Why isn't the group named "WTFM"?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Why isn't the group named "WTFM"? ("Write the...")

About The Linux Doc Page

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

1) I kind of expected to be routed to /dev/null when I click on the "Linux Doc" link.
2) But, no, it's real site (http://www.tldp.org/)...whose unfriendly and unhelpful home page looks exactly like it was written and designed by a bunch of Linux coders.

Good docs distinguish the pros from the herd

[fyngyrz]

The enterprise linked in TFS is clearly for beginners. Beginners tend to be younger. Video is pretty much the preferred information delivery method (on the receiving end) for recent generations. The majority does not gravitate towards reading (and perhaps that accounts for why the writing problem is so prevalent as well.)

If you're working at a professional level, you can already prepare good documentation, and will, whenever it's called for. You may even have developed your own toolchain for doing so.

If you can't prepare good documentation when it is needed, or won't, but think you're working at a professional level... you're wrong. :)

Re:Good docs distinguish the pros from the herd

[Aighearach]

Right, people for whom video is the preferred delivery method are not going to write documentation. Or read it either. It is idiotic to make videos to connect with them to advocate to them that they read more. Their teachers already tried and failed, casual encouragement isn't going to move the needle.

If somebody cares enough about these unfortunates to try, they should just skip right ahead to videos teaching them to make video documentation for each other.

As an aside, I've been way over 99% FLOSS since the late 90s, and the vast majority of that software has extensive documentation. That was true then, and it remains true now. Though I can also say from experience that if you're using recently-popular programming frameworks, the documentation won't be finished until after the fad passes, leaving most of the people who briefly used it during the heyday with the idea that it is poorly documented, even where the people using it successfully have high quality documentation. In many cases, the documentation was always there, but individual blogs describing techniques get more links. Often this is compounded by a culture of experimentation that inadvertently discourages reading manuals; you can spot this by all the people that run to a paste site to ask questions that would have been answered by a small subset of the same words being entered into a search bar.