Comment on How do I Graphene OS?
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month agoMy partner is trying to break into open source and I keep suggesting that she tries to focus on making and producing quality documentation for existing projects.
Documentation on most projects sucks donkey balls and if you aren’t used to reading through 16 seemingly unrelated forum posts before you even start, you’re gonna have a bad time.
ugo@feddit.it 1 month ago
Seems like a bad idea unless she’s very familiar with the projects she would help document. Documentation is notoriously not something that can be produced by a newcomer, because it requires experience that a newcomer doesn’t have.
I guess the best way for a newcomer would try to use the product and ask every little question they have to make sure they receive the correct answers and context and, at the end of the process, enough knowledge would help gained to contribute at least one piece of documentation. But the bulk of the knowledge would still come from people that already know the product, so in terms of efficiency it’s way worse than having the authors write it.
Of course, if the authors are unwilling or unable to write good (or any, even) documentation, having someone that has the will to gather the scattered information into a central place and work on it so it’s digestible and high quality is still unbelievably useful.
But yeah, my point being that documentation is far trickier than it seems as far as open source contributions go.