Welcome Pack for Doc contributors (draft)

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Thursday 02 September 2004 10:15, Philip Rodrigues wrote:
> 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?
>

Looks great.

I would only explain better what kde-quality and kde-doc-english has to offer: 
kde-quality offer support (and guidance if requested). kde-doc-english is the 
forum to discuss all documentation issues.

I imagine that this mail is focused on writers. What do you think about  
rewriting this section:

"dealing with docs.kde.org, dealing with the XML tools used to generate 
documentation, programming stuff to automate, for example, screenshot 
generation."

to 

"writing context help, articles, web pages, etc..."?

Rationale: the new writer probably don't know about docs.kde.org, or the XML 
tools. And he may be interested in other writing tasks as well.

Here is my take:

----

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-quality at kde.org. We can help you with the documentation tools, and to 
find the short cuts in the free software jungle!  The kde-quality mailing 
list main objective is to support you while you are starting to work with 
KDE, so don't hesitate to announce yourself.

We can help 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. Taking screenshots, writing context help, articles, web pages, etc...

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 on line at http://i18n.kde.org/doc/doc-primer or 
http://quality.kde.org/develop/howto/howtodocs.php . 
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.

After getting up to speed, we strongly recommend that you subscribe to the 
kde-doc-english mailing list, where we discuss all documentation issues. 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,

KDE Quality Team
KDE Documentation Team

----

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz