[libreoffice-documentation] LibreOffice WikiHelp

l10n
#1

Hi Kendy,

Hi,

I am sorry - I promised the LibO online help (WikiHelp) already the last
week, but it haven't happened; it needed more work than anticipated :frowning:

Either way, the good news is that I am currently uploading the files,
and I'll make the site online as soon as it finishes, and I do few
trivial checks; it should be later today (ETA 5 more hours, I am
populating the database through the Mediawiki API, not directly). So
far I am uploading only the English version.

It will be read-only until RC2, so that it is easy to report bugs
against the tooling that converts the help from the format that is used
in the source code. After RC2, I plan to open it for your edits&
improvements :slight_smile:

Please, also coordinate this work with localizers. We have spent thousand hundreds of hours on these help files and would like to be aware of what will happen to them, and how they will be handled now, the tranlsation process and so on.
Having the help not available is currently seen as a stopper for RC1, so please, could you give us more details and explain what you're willing to do.
Thanks in advance,
Kind regards
Sophie

#2

Sorry, just my 2 cents -

wiki is a totally non-appropriate format for the main repository of
office suite help. It can serve as a copy or an additional resource,
extruded from the repository of help files automagically before every
release etc. But it cannot be a main repository of help - it offers no
appropriate translation tools, its system of watching changes on
appropriate English pages is not user-friendly and also - last but not
least - wiki offers access to users who will be able to change help
files like wikipaedia - while that might look great it could become a
nightmare from the editorial point of view - who would be responsible
for the help content? Who would assure quality of the help?

Have these things been discussed and approved by the lang-teams? Or is
this the same pattern as with OOo - the big guns decide what will
happen and the lang-teams must do it their way? No matter how
inappropriate that decision is for the localizers?

Please make this clear so some lang-teams from OOo can decide if we
will join LO effort or not - if this decentralized wiki help system is
the future of LO, maybe LO does not need us localization teams, you
could directly ask users for localization of the help. And we can
continue to do our job professionally within more editorial
localization processes at other open-source projects.

Lp, m.