Wiki focus - user versus developer documentation

[Ben Batt]

Hi,

Somebody wrote:
>> ... there mostly is a clear difference between developing software and
>> using the software. I can't imagine in which areas it would be hard to
>> separate them. Can you tell me on which pages you think this could
>> cause problems?

As Michael Shiloh mentioned:

> currently solving a problem from a user's perspective might involve a patch
> or scripting, so it starts looking like it belongs in the developer category

I think that as long as the purpose of a page is clear, these issues
can be fixed as the software becomes more stable. If we know that a
page is supposed to be part of the user manual, esoteric hacking
commands to change the configuration can be deleted or moved to the
developer page for that feature when they are no longer needed by
normal users.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:08 AM, Minh Ha Duong <haduong at centre-cired.fr> wrote:
> The last time we discussed this, the conclusion was that we focus now on
> categorizing, then we will do a mass page rename if needed. What I think was
> more or less implicit was that we would take a few dozens of pages, tag them
> as "Handbook", set a navigation template that look like a book's table of
> content, and prefix everything with "Handbook/". Then we could
> 1. Export them with tiddlywiki to be installed statically on every device.
> 2. Export them statically every day/week/release to a different url,
> maybe "Handbook.openmoko.org", with a noob-friendly CSS. With a searchbox and
> a button that sends back to the wiki for editing of course.
> 3. Use some Wiki-to-pdf tool to sell a nice handbook for Normal Users.
>
> Come to think of it, the handbook domain do not have to be managed by Openmoko
> inc...
> What do you guys say ?

This sounds really good to me. I would suggest "Manual" instead of
"Handbook", as it seems clearer, but maybe that's just me. I'm not
sure I see a need for point 2, however - I think with good wiki layout
and configuration this would probably be unnecessary, and it would be
good to avoid things getting out of sync.

Ben