We're at the book and documentation sprint out at the very lovely Woolman Centre near Nevada city in California. A sub group of us have taken on the mighty task of analysing how the wiki content sits with the book content. We're focusing on the User and Administrator guide at the moment, which is online at http://book.civicrm.org/user/.
What we're doing, is each taking a section of the book at a time, then going through the wiki - http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC and finding all related content.
We're then labelling the wiki pages in 2 ways:
1. According to which section of the book the page corresponds to e.g. 'basic-set-up' or 'events'.
2. An indication of the relationship between the wiki page and the book. One of the following 4 labels:
Legacy - Content which may be outdated, or perhaps doesn't seem that useful or relevent.
Included - Content which is already included comprhensivley in the book.
Intended - Content which is not included in the book and that we think it would be useful to include.
Additional - Content where some of it has been included, but we think that it would be beneficial to include other parts of that page.
Remaining - Content where it is appropriate for it to remain on the wiki
We think that with the combination of the chapter tag and the status tag, this is a really good start to mapping the relationship between the book and the wiki. This feels like stage 1 - getting a handle on the terrain. Stage 2 will happen at some point, which will be adding the relevant bits to the book, and using useful wiki content to edit existing parts of the book.
If you have any ideas that you think would be useful for us, we're working on this over the next few days. Also, if you want to get involved (virtually) just comment here and we can liase on section assignment so we don't tread one each others toes.
I'll give an update later on in the week.
Comments
This is great - I have been hugely impressed by the book project(s).
One question I have is how can the community (e.g., people like me) make updates to the book? This has been easy to do on the wiki, and though I am guilty for not always updating wiki content I found to be out-dated, I did do this a good several times.
I checked the link at the bottom of a book page ("You can help improve documentation") but it brought me to the CiviCRM home page - maybe just this link needs updating and then my question will be answered.
Hey Fen,
The documentation link got changed in the site upgrade from http://civicrm.org/documentation http://civicrm.org/participate/documentation.
I've updated the home page to reflect that and will update the books when we finish this sprint. at that point, they will have a nice new look also + fingers crossed ability to download as epub and pdf.
Those instructions are the best way ATM to get started with contributing since they explain the whole book release process.
I think we need to do some improvements to the workflow and get better at incorperating small contributions. we're trying to balance that with the need to ensure high level docs. there is the book email list if you would like to be part of that discussion and work :)