[documentation] How to get more people involved with documentation

[Gary Feldman]

Luiz wrote:
> I am seeing many efforts from you to improve of the documentation.
>
> It's very good, but in my humble opinion the book page is the wrong 
> "fundation". Many peoples already said the same.
>
> You are trying to reform a great building which have sixty floors, but 
> the foundation only can "manage" 2 floors.
I agree with you that the book pages on drupal.org aren't adequate, 
though I'm not sure I agree with the details of your analysis.

A significant part of the problem is just the design of the site.  Three 
columns doesn't leave enough room in the center for tables or code 
examples, with the result that I often see content obscured by the right 
hand column.  Even when that doesn't happen, the sidebars are too 
visually distracting.  The next page link wraps under the previous page 
link, and the applicable version links flow into the main text.  I could 
go on, but the point is that it's not simply a problem with the Book 
node type, and just changing the stylesheet could be a big improvement.

But you're right that navigation is a big issue, as is editing the 
organization.  It doesn't seem to be easy to try moving a section to 
several different places in a sequence, just to see which works best.  
Or more globally, it's hard to edit the overall structure of the 
document.  (Compare, for example, the node tree editor in FrontPage.  
I'm no fan of FrontPage, but that's the most convenient example I 
know.)  The sidebar contents listing just doesn't work well for me, 
partly because sidebars get ignored but also because it's hard to read, 
find where you are, and find which pages have subsections.  The 
guideline against including headers on a page conspires to discourage 
outline organization.  The lack of a path structure discourages cross 
references (especially when compared to a wiki).  And although the 
advanced search mechanism is better than the plain search, it's still 
hard to use and inadequate.

However, I don't really know what to do about this, short of starting 
from scratch.  Using a wiki module would address part of the problem, 
but creates new ones, especially with a large group of contributors.  
Changing the style sheet for the site, or at least for book pages, would 
help a little.  But I don't know of any module that would really be 
suitable.

Gary