[kde-doc-english] Re: First competition

[Lauri Watts]

On Wednesday 08 September 2004 23.09, Antonio Salazar wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 21:16:43 +0100, Philip Rodrigues

> > That's a fair point, but I think it will be just as easy to only accept
> > plain text. Hopefully, the people writing will be new to documentation,
> > and sometimes it's easier to add all the markup than to correct wrong
> > markup :-)
>
> True. On the other hand, it would mean that those who are used to
> Docbook and could take some work off of other peoples' shoulders would
> be writing it in plaintext as well. I suppose its just a matter of
> whether the risk of badly-written Docbook is worth it.

It's not (so) much the risk of badly written DocBook, it's that having to 
write in DocBook is a major hurdle to joining in. 

Even though, for years now, we've been saying "You don't have to write in 
DocBook", nearly every new contributor starts up trying to, and nearly all of 
them get frustrated early on (DB isn't hard, but the learning curve is 
initially quite steep).  Frustrated people mostly tend to just quit, and 
that's a pity, because we're happy to deal with the markup to start with, and 
give them a hand up that steep learning curve.

Asking for Plain Text submissions actually seems to circumvent that.  Saying 
that DB is acceptable too, may dilute the message a little, so it should 
definitely be second, or a footnote, or just left out (anyone reading *this* 
list already knows DB is acceptable.  

At this point, the level of work involved in marking up plain text submissions 
amounts to about 5 minutes a week each for me and Phil, if that much.  The 
amount of work it would take for the two of us to *write* everything that's 
missing, is rather larger.  What we need is more contributors doing the 
writing.  More markup guru's can come later.

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org
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