Hi folks, I’ve been pondering upon documentation practices of different Fedora editions and edition-agnostic documentation like Quick Docs/release notes. To find inspiring examples outside Fedora, I examined documentation sites of a couple of other Linux distros. To suppress confirmation bias, I reminded myself of two things;
- Things are not always comparable.
- As the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the other side.
I picked two distros because these two are community-run and sponsored by a company. And Arch.
- OpenSUSE Documentation
– GitHub Docs repo: 114 contributors - Ubuntu Documentation
– Docs team structure: 30 active members, 95 committers, 3 wiki editors - Arch Linux: over 400 active documentation contributors
In spite of generous support from casual contributors and full-time resources from Red Hat until April 2023, some of Fedora docs is not looked after at all for months. Docs weekly meeting is run by 1 or 2 people. It is hard to keep motivated at this stage - that’s me inclusive. It is even harder to mentor new contributors if the current state is left unattended.
Opinion poll statement for your vote is
If we bring back full-time resources to Docs team, it will make a huge difference to the growth of documentation contributors and help thrive documentation projects across working groups including Docs team.
For example, resources are either UX/Antora specialist or board member/technical reviewers.
- Yes, it will make a difference.
- No, we are good. What’s the big deal?
- I don’t know. I think you’re too sceptical.