I promised to blog about some ideas for improving Ubuntu documentation in the course of the next 6 months, before the 7.04 release (Feisty Fawn - best codename EVER), so here I go.
The last release cycle has been slow for documentation, but there is a real base for moving up to the next level. The core of material is there, what I'd really like to work on is making the documentation more discoverable, and more user-friendly.
Here's a vague list of ideas. We have specifications for some of them. If you're interested in working on documentation, please subscribe and post to the documentation team mailing list.
- Improve the discoverability and ease of use of the documentation shipped on board Ubuntu - we know that very few people use this documentation, preferring to use the website and other online support resources, and we can improve that situation. Two specs address this: topic based help, and usable help menu.
- Merging the Ubuntu book with the shipped documentation - it's in nobody's interest to have separate sources of documentation which are regarded as official - the user has to spend twice as much time reading and searching through them all, and we'd like to merge the Ubuntu book with the other documentation provided in the Ubuntu system. This should be a high priority for the next 6 months. It's possible because the Ubuntu book is (in theory) under a free license, although in practice so far we haven't been able to obtain the source.
- Improve the searchability of the system documentation - we need to add keyword tags to many sections of our documentation to ensure that they can be more easily found using the help system's search facility.
- Improve the presentation of the online documentation - the documentation website has now been live for 6 months, and as with all new projects, a number of ways to improve it have become clear. The experiment with providing a partly localised documentation website has not really worked, as users find it confusing to be presented with documentation partly in one language and partly in another. Further, the distinction we've used so far on the site between "official" documentation and "community" documentation is misleading - there is plenty of material in the community section which is perfectly reliable, perhaps even more so than the official material. As a result I'd like it if we can merge the official and community sections of that website, and adopt a more coherent way of telling the user how reliable the material they have found is. The latter aim is addressed by the help wiki quality assurance specification.
- Improve the build system for the system documentation - this is a technical point. Far too much time is spent at the moment when getting the documentation and in particular the translations ready for release. I'd like to be able to simplify and improve the build system in our repository so that a few simple commands will be able to do all that is needed to prepare the documentation for release. The simplify ubuntu docs build process specification addresses this.
- Address licensing issues - again a more technical point. The licensing of all Ubuntu documentation needs comprehensive review. The documentation team has discussed this a lot in the past, so hopefully we can implement a simpler and more effective license policy quickly. The idea is to move to a license which permits the documentation team to use material from the forums, the Ubuntu book, and the community documentation wiki. The rationalize documentation licensing and wiki licensing specifications address this.