[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[mick at mcin.net]

>
> I think that, despite the name "FLOSS Manuals," we have to think about
> smaller contributions and about how to tie them together. I've known this at
> least since 2004 when I first wrote about online contributions. Here's one
> of my articles for background:


I agree with the need for this but maybe FLOSS manuals isn't the place for
this.

Take the Drupal manuals that I'm starting now for example and hoping to get
help with on the mini sprint 17-19th April.

Drupal is a nightmare to document, I think we can all agree on that, that's
why well written books on it actually sell. However there is also clearly a
place for on going micro documentation - this is currently on the pages on
the relevant Drupal groups and modules and forums and blogs.

If we were to try to move that to FLOSS Manuals then the Drupal
'manuals' would soon be as messy as the Drupal site.

I'm thinking of the Drupal manual for FLOSS Manuals as a middle ground
between the two. It's maintained by a smallish number of people guiding the
contents, in this case the inicial drive would be to represent how to do
multimedia in a couple of ways using the currently preferred version of
Drupal version 6.

This would have the same level of clarity as a Drupal book, the same self
imposed limitations (to create that clarity) - but with the advantage that
we can update the 'best practice' for how to achieve certain goals as the
technology improves and shifts (as it seems to do every 6 months in Drupal)

I think this is a different situation with something like the Command Line,
where there isn't going to be huge divergences in the ways people do things,
and indeed the subject matter really lends itself to breaking things down in
the micro sections, but I'm wondering how many situations this can be
applied to.

I also wonder if we should because of these issues, limit the scope of the
Drupal manual to something thing like - 'Overview of Multimedia in Drupal '

In general I think we need to be clear about what FLOSS Manuals isn't as
well as what it is. I think this will help us when we are faced with issues
of Communities who have their own documentation systems - which I think are
more normally used to these smaller contributions.

Mick
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