Work in progress. If this hasn't been edited for over 30 days you can do what ever you want with it. Until then, please leave your comments in the comments section.
Partially based on http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpfulHelp. These are basically ideas I wanted to write down somewhere.
Overview
Three ways for the community to ask/answer questions:
- Wiki
- Forum
- IRC/IM
Additional sources of information:
- Existing help pages
- Official Howtos
- Random sites on the net
Wiki articles
The wiki is an easy and quick way to write simple howtos and documentation. Since the articles are written by random people, the quality varies greatly. There is already a project which aims to simplify the integration of wiki articles with the official help documentation. The articles would be cherry picked, reviewed and exported to docbook before inclusion in the official version.
The pros and cons with wikis are relevan to all traditional documentation
Usage
Pros:
- Extensive explanations
- Usually searchable
Cons with usage:
- Doesn't allow people to ask questions/get responses (basically non interactive)
- Can be to general, i.e. don't always contain all the info needed for my special setup.
- A 100 page document is intimidating
Maintanance
Pros:
- The traditional way
Cons:
- Easily get out of date (not so much with wikis)
- Review process
- Structure
Forum
Forums usually solve very specific problems compared to articles. A person has a problem with something, and hopefully gets a short reply on how to fix them. These are not the places to get general info about how to set up software raid, or a beowulf cluster.
Usage
Pros:
- Interactive, i.e. people ask questions and others try to answer them
- Information can also be retrieved later.
- Most forums are searchable.
Cons:
- Will not get extensive advice
- Somewhat dependent on the know-how of the community at that instance
- No immediate answers, i.e. it will take some time before anyone responds to your question.
Maintanance
Pros:
- If a community builds up writing the answers, little maintanance is needed.
Cons:
- The quality of the answeres varies
- Without a good community, the forum is worthless.
- Traditionally not used by hackers
IRC/IM
IRC is a very common place for the more knowledgeable hackers to hang out. You might even get your answer from a person who has developed the software you are having problems with. Newbies are often familiar with IM and not IRC.
Usage
Pros:
- Immediate answers
- Possible to be handheld through a (short) process
- Sometimes extremely knowledgeable people will help you
Cons:
- Largely dependant on the amount of people awake at that point
- The quality will vary
- No archive to search
Maintanance
Pros:
- With a strong commuinty this is the ultimate way for newbies to get simple enough answers
- Extrememly interactive
- Coders hang on irc anyway
Cons:
- Same questions will need answering again and again.
- Can draw immence amounts of manpower
Suggestion