Talk:Documentation/Dashboard/Wiki Help
May I put some comments here on the proposal made in the article? If this is not the right place or if the issues have been discussed elsewhere, please point me to the right place. Thanks.
I'm not a programmer, just a long year user of any kind of software. So maybe my help requirements must be seen from that perspective.
The point I want to make is that a wiki based help needs much manpower to keep it alive as some important points are not automatized by the software. So if the software is specific and the community is huge, like in Firefox or Thunderbird, this will work. But in OOo it's different: the software is huge/general and the community is not too large, therefore I'd like to suggest to use a software other than the wiki. A software which has more built-in support for the occurring tasks.
A good solution in my eyes is the php help (on php.net). I like it, because it's complete, accurate, actual (means version dependent), searchable, localized, and transparent. And allows for user comments. (Maybe, it could be even better if user comments were ratable regarding their helpfulness like the book reviews in amazon.com. But it's pretty sufficient to have a review team responsible of deleting junk comments.) Having it downloadable for offline use would make it perfect.
Regarding the proposed wiki help I see some problems. First, version dependency cannot be established accurately in the wiki. Ideally, one should be completely locked into the help for a given software version (and a given language, if desired). Navigation should reflect this filtered view. Search should deliver only hits from within this version. In my eyes these requirements should be explicitly supported by the help framework. As far as I have seen up to now, this is difficult to achieve with wiki software.
So these were my points. I don't know a software which fulfills these requirements, but nevertheless wanted to state them explicitly. If this has been discussed already I'm sorry I didn't find it.
