[documentation] [Documentation support] Request to join doc team - Ultrabob

Mon Feb 5 04:48:12 UTC 2007

Issue status update for 
http://drupal.org/node/114179
Post a follow up: 
http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/114179

 Project:      Documentation
 Version:      <none>
 Component:    Misc
 Category:     support requests
 Priority:     normal
 Assigned to:  Anonymous
 Reported by:  ultrabob
 Updated by:   ultrabob
 Status:       active

I am eager to do it if I can be of help.  Will quietly await a decision.

ultrabob

Previous comments:
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Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:44:01 +0000 : ultrabob

Hi,

This is almost certainly the wrong forum for this type of request, so
please accept my apologies in advance, but I will be reading through the
docs quite a bit in the next couple of weeks and thought I could give
back a little by correcting little errors in spelling and grammar and
the like where I found them.  Would it be possible to get the
appropriate permissions to allow this?

thanks,

UltraBob

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Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:56:59 +0000 : ultrabob

Just a followup based on Karldied's suggstions:

My user number is 110463. 

I have seen the following pages:

Contributing to documentation, http://drupal.org/node/24572
Joining the documentation team, http://drupal.org/node/23367
pages...

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Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:25:05 +0000 : karldied

title clarification.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:05:23 +0000 : ultrabob

My looks at the documentation on the Drupal site will probably start off
at their most intense today, and I'll also be looking at things from the
eyes of someone unfamiliar with things.  As I start to learn what drupal
is capable of and how to do things, my time in the documentation will
naturally taper off, and that is why I would like to encourage someone
to take action in the near future to let me join the docs team if that
will happen.

I do have previous experience with writing, and with writing docs and
technical explanations.  Pretty much all of my recent work has been in
Japanese though, as documentation for my company's own products, so I
can't really point you to anything that would be a very good example.  I
blog very occasionally at my company's website at
http://www.akatombo.com so if you would like to verify that I can put
thoughts together in written form in a somewhat casual manner that would
be a place to look.

At any rate, I'd like to give something back to the community if we are
going to be using Drupal for the website I'm working on so I'd be happy
if I could contribute something to the docs as I find things that could
use editing.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:35:57 +0000 : VeryMisunderstood

just to inform, one does not have to be part of the documentation team
to create handbook pages for use in the documentation area.

A desire to become part of the Documentation Team would show in your
willingness to create the pages and submit them using the create content
link.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:37:25 +0000 : VeryMisunderstood

pages you create that get submitted will allow you editing privledges.

Documentation Team does not have access to edit other authors pages.
That would be a site maintainer.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:01:03 +0000 : ultrabob

Oh ok, what would be the best way to suggest changes then?  I don't have
the knowledge to write my own documentation at this point, but could be
useful in editing, fixing spelling, etc.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:07:44 +0000 : VeryMisunderstood

Contacting the author of the handbook page may help. Many of them of
them are still very much active in the community. If you rewrite an
entire page, submitting it with the corrections , the handbook
maintainers would consider the revisions I am sure.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:34:23 +0000 : ultrabob

OK, thank you for the advice.  I'll go ahead and close this, and go try
to figure out how to contact authors and things like that.  Appreciate
the quick replies.

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Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:56:07 +0000 : karldied

Re-opening issue. There is some misunderstanding that needs to be
clarified. Documentation team members are assigned the documentation
maintainer role. That role gives edit privileges of Filtered HTML and
Full HTML handbook pages, but not PHP pages, or some other special
pages. Regardless of author. This should be clear in Contributing to
documentation, http://drupal.org/node/24572 but perhaps its not. 

The confusion may come from the fact that doc team members have been
asked not to change the author field from the original when we update a
page, but it turns out doc team members don't have this privilege -- the
author is automatically updated to the latest editor. Thus, the original
author loses edit privileges if a doc team member updates it, unless one
of the Drupal.org webmasters (site maintainer? or site admin? role)
changes the author back. The Documentation writer's guide,
http://drupal.org/documentation-writers-guide tries to explain this. 

Ultrabob, it sounds like you might be a very good addition to the team,
since someone using the documentation handbooks for the first time to
perform tasks that are new to him often reveals the best usability
insights.