You may have noticed there is a larger world of free software outside of Fedora than inside. The number of packages inside the Fedora Universe has really grown.
You may have noticed there is a larger world of Fedora-specific how-to documentation outside of Fedora than inside. A really huge amount. You may notice that the amount inside has grown very little by comparison.
There is new how-to documentation on the Fedora Planet nearly every day. The Fedora Forum is full of useful (and not so useful) content. Sub-communities such as Fedora-fr have rich document sets. People write how-to content in to their blogs, to their own wikis or CMS systems, or post downloadable content from any number of places. I just caught up on a thread on Fedora Ambassadors list about a Fedora 10 how-to document. As cool as it the document is, as great as the effort is, I could not help my first thought. “Why is this document not written as part of Fedora itself?”
You know, just write it and add [[Category:How to]] and [[Category:Draft documentation]] to the pages.
The irony is, it is harder to get a package in to Fedora than a document, but because of our poor documentation (compared to the Packaging Guidelines) and equally poor marketing(?), not many people are taking the step to bring Fedora content inside of Fedora.
Since there are going to be a large number of contributors handy at the upcoming FUDCon, maybe that’s a chance to talk about it.
There are some very-near-term fixes that are going to make it easier to bring content inside of Fedora. Then all we need is the better marketing. 🙂
- Recent wiki gardening work, including page renaming and smart category usage, is yielding a useful wiki. Ian Weller, myself, and others are going to be swinging the wiki hammer at FUDConF11, and it’s much more than learning about the markup. There are real and useful best practices that yield you a useful set of wiki content. Looked at the Fonts SIG pages lately? That’s one way to do it. Hopefully I’ll be showing off the newly trimmed, renamed, and categorized Docs Project pages at FUDCon.
- Better localization for the wiki — a wiki per native-language means people can include locale-specific content as well as content translated from the main English wiki. What would help more here is a way to track when new pages are created in native-language wikis that do not correspond to one from the English wiki. This flags those pages as possibly worthy of translation to other languages, including English.
- A content management system. I’ve been talking about this for a while, and hope that FUDCon helps move the needle on this activity. This helps by distributing publishing rights to the teams who own the content — the writing teams, the SIGs, and the other sub-projects. By having content more tied to Fedora versions, it make it easier on writers who only want to maintain content for a specific version of Fedora.
- This all makes using DocBook XML much easier for everyone. We’ve already had a boost from the relative ease of using Publican. By hosting each guide as a separate project on fedorahosted.org, the onus and accountability is firmly in the writing team and not blocked by project administrators. This was how we rolled for Fedora 10 in doing the Installation Guide and Release Notes — task tracking with Trac and project management from within the team. When that content is using an installable, upstream maintained system such as Publican surrounded by standard processes, we are much farther in the goal of creating a useful, repeatable documentation process that can be borrowed from Fedora and used in other places.
If you are writing content that really could or should be on the Fedora wiki, please join the wiki mailing list and find out how to do it right.
BTW, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_SIG is probably a better fonts SIG link
I have to wonder, how much of the most useful information that is out and about as external help covers 3rd party software that Fedora doesn’t include as a driving reason to start writing a howto as an external document.
What howto functionality do people end up documenting first in their blog or in a forum or whatever..which makes their documentation a popular reference initially and encourages them to keep writing externally? I think for a lot of people writing external documentation in the howto area…its 3rd party software.
Are people allowed to write up documentation as part of Fedora using the documentation toolchain covering howto guides for things like mp3, dvd playback, nvidia driver installation or things like adobe flash or skype application installations?
It’s a serious question. If we can’t give people a platform to write about making use of these popular 3rd party software people will grow their on communication channels to talk about them, and then will continue to use those communication channels to document even more things.
-jef
Well, I think you know the answer to that. We are as unable to allow people to talk about how to implement infringing technologies as we are to provide the technologies. So, for that sub-set of documents, there isn’t much we can do.
What I see are documents that have these features:
Forbidden content is inter-woven with content that is generally fine.
Content that does not follow best Fedora methods mixed with content that is a fine Fedora way to do things.
However, much of the first item content is not illegal/forbidden everywhere, just in the US and a few other draconian nations. Some of the method transgressions in the second item are just because of having to go to e.g. RPMFusion for software.
As you say, this is a reasonable question to ask. I think there are some potential solutions:
Pull all the permitted content in to the Fedora wiki
Within a relevant section, such as Multimedia, have a generic call, “For details on installing other software solutions, try these reference sites,” then link to the Fedora FAQ, rpmfusion.org, etc.
Work with those content providers to migrate their content creation and maintenance to Fedora proper, so they can off-load some or all of the work. Then they can focus on just the content that matters to them that cannot be within Fedora. This is akin to how RPMFusion works; they provide add-on packages to the Fedora base, and do not strive to replicate all of Fedora. The same should happen with their content; share the burden with the wider Fedora community on fedoraproject.org, and carry the lighter burden for the bits that cannot be in Fedora.
I know most of the people at those sites now, with the exception of Fedora Forum, and forging this level of relationship is the kind of activity I really should be focused on, IMO.
One of the many reasons not to contribute to the wiki you can read in my blog post: http://vinci.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/fedora-open-up-your-documentation/
Many contributors dissasociated from this licensing scheme and additional CLA. Actually I think very smart person would dissasociate. Many others asccept it, because they just want to contribute to the wiki and do not think wabout the impact.
Thilo, I don’t agree with all your arguments, including your blog post title. Fedora Documentation is free and open. It may not use your preferred license, but that does not make it non-free and non-open. Thus, your title is misleading and inflammatory. The rest of my comments I’ll make on your post directly, as there are some misconceptions and facts I’d like to set straight.
That said, I really appreciate that you care enough to write your post and to let me know about it. I started a discussion on the appropriate list (fedora-docs-list) about reconsidering our licensing, and several good points have arisen.
I cannot be sure what is going to happen from here, but one thing is fully clear. It is the Fedora Project’s decision how to proceed, not an invisible puppet master. There are sound and legitimate reasons things are the way they are, just as there are sound and legitimate reasons to change them.
And maybe that time to change is now?
I did not mean to be rude or offensive. I admit I choose titles that get more attention than more serious titles. If there is a change I would welcome it. I have some other longterm criticism that I think is important but doesnt fit into the category of the post. I will research the latest status and may summarize that in another post. Fedora is a great distro, technically and important, too. But the fact is, I hardly know anybody who uses it in Germany. And there are reasons for that.