[FM Discuss] Style Guide? (Floss Manual Guide is involved enough?)

[Tomi Toivio]

Hello,

What I am worried about is the building of a FLOSS Manuals community here in
Finland. We have the wiki and many translated manuals but building a
community is a slow process. I am afraid that forcing potential contributors
to read a style guide before they can write anything would turn most of the
potential contributors away. I am afraid that to use professional technical
writing procedures, standards and methods in the wiki would make the task of
building a community a lot harder. This should not be limited to
professional technical writers. I think that this should be an open wiki for
open source enthusiasts rather than an online community of technical writing
professionals.

Regards
Tomi

2009/12/4 mp <mp at aktivix.org>

>
> The immediate question, to me, is: who will write the style manual for
> the writing of the style manual?
>
> On a more serious level: perhaps there could be some sort of way of
> adding comments to the different manuals about the style used in that
> particular manual. In that way there could maybe be an exchange and a
> learning process about style, rather than some sort of central committe
> style Scripture that tells people how to write.
>
> With regard to professional writers: well, thank god that this is a
> volunteer effort. The world has seen more than enough professionalism
> and efficiency, I think.
>
> -martin
> (contributor of a little idiosyncratically written part of the Firefox
> in Ubuntu manual)
>
> dwp wrote:
> > Hi: Some time ago when i first became acquainted with FLOSS, the first
> thing i ran across was an 80 page document that I think was intended to tell
> me how to write for FLOSS. Did/does it really have to be that complicated?
> For a while it discouraged me.
> >
> > I'm kindof with you. Style guides (besides sometimes being difficult to
> remember) stand in the way. I think there is even a guide that tells you haw
> to write manuals using only 800 "basic English" words:). Doubleplus
> ungood:).
> >
> > Regards: David
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> > http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
> >
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>



-- 
Best Regards
Tomi Toivio
Open Source Coordinator
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
tomi at flossmanuals.net
+358445488856
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