[kde-doc-english] Welcome Pack for Doc contributors (draft)

Philip Rodrigues philip.rodrigues at chch.ox.ac.uk
Thu Sep 2 15:15:50 CEST 2004


Hi all,
Based on discussions at aKademy, I've put together this draft of a welcome 
pack which we can send to people offering to help with KDE documentation. You 
can find the rationale for most of the decisions I've made at 
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Documentation+Team+Ideas . I guess 
that the quality teams might want to make some changes and additions if using 
this in the context of QT...

Questions, suggestions, mistakes, etc?

------BEGIN------
Hi,
Thanks for your offer to help with KDE documentation - we're glad to welcome 
you onto the team!

If there's a particular application or document that you'd like to work on, 
that's great! Just tell us what it is, and we can put you in touch with the 
right people to get started straight away.

If you're not sure what you'd like to work on, that's no problem. We have 
tasks which are simple and easy for beginners, through to longer and slightly 
more difficult jobs. This is a volunteer project, so we won't tell you that 
you *must* work on something, but to help you narrow down on something you'd 
enjoy, we've divided the available tasks into four categories. Take a look at 
them, and if you'd like to work on one category in particular, tell us here 
at kde-doc-english at kde.org/kde-quality at kde.org, and we can find a task that 
suits you:

1. Writing new content for application manuals
2. Updating content/proofreading for application manuals
3. Writing content for general KDE documentation, like the User Guide or the 
Glossary
4. Non-writing things: taking screenshots, dealing with docs.kde.org, dealing 
with the XML tools used to generate documentation, programming stuff to 
automate, for example, screenshot generation.

We also have a lot of resources that you'll use when writing documentation:

The main reference for everything docs-related is the KDE Documentation 
Primer, which you can find online at http://i18n.kde.org/doc/doc-primer . 
This should walk you through everything you need to know to get up to speed 
on writing docs for KDE, but be aware that it's still a work-in-progress. If 
you find any errors or omissions or bits that don't make sense, please tell 
us at kde-doc-english at kde.org.

We recommend that you subscribe to the kde-doc-english mailing list. It's very 
low traffic, but will keep you up-to-date on what's happening with KDE 
documentation. You can find instructions on subscribing at:
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-doc-english

You can also find us on IRC in #kde-docs on irc.freenode.net . Feel free to 
join us there any time.

Once again, thanks for your offer of help, and we look forward to working with 
you,

-------END-----------

Perhaps if someone could trim down my slightly waffly writing style, that'd be 
great. 

What do you think of having a 'Next steps' section at the end, reiterating the 
things that someone would want to do next (choose an area to work on, read 
the doc primer, subscribe to k-d-e)? Sometimes I think that we throw a lot of 
information at contributors, and it's not clear what they need to *do* next.

Regards,
Phil
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