Community Documentation
Documentation is always a painful task: especially with software, since programming is hard enough. I tend to slack off on commenting code, and I rarely document anything I do. As long as I wrote it, no matter how old, I can usually figure out how everything works. If I give out code, I usually let other people figure out everything, but who does that really help? I guess people that are competent programmers that are just too lazy to write their own.
This article about community documentation was interesting. I think documentation would improve greatly if users write their documentation. The user comments on PHP.net and the Ruby on Rails wiki are good examples. Active users become more knowledgable than developers a lot of times, and developers don’t necessarily see things from the users perspective. Just look at the horrible UIs employed by some of the biggest software. I don’t know any one that has ever said they love Flash’s UI.
But, back to getting users to write documentation. How do you get them to do it? Do you ask them nicely? I don’t know…I think that’s a challenge all on it’s own. But people like free things, like free software. Why not come up with a new license where you would give out free licenses for contributing documentation while you can choose to opt-out if you just want to buy it and save the trouble of writing.
