Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[puppian]

This post about 'reward' reminds me this. Should we let people include their name and email in the docs they wrote, like what the Linux documentation project does?
For example,
http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/3-Button-Mouse.html

Contributors who aren't joining the docs committee may want their name appear somewhere

Btw, I think I have seen in other docs project something like 'these docs are under xxx license'. I'm no good at that, so do we need that?

[Ian]

Yes I think credit should be given to all who contribute to this project.
And I'm not sure about the license part.

[J_Rey]

Yesterday I spent a few hours categorizing the wiki (mostly done) to make it easier to find things for referring to when creating documentation pages (in addition to the Sitemap). Also, I submitted the CategoryDocumentation wiki page to DistroWatch until our site is ready (people are already visiting there). So my categorizing the pages had another specific purpose.

I was thinking about, for my contribution, eventually starting out with having a related links/contributors section at the bottom of each documentation page that has links to related wiki, pupweb, and forum pages (and other sources like Barry's offline Help pages included with Puppy) that would be helpful for anyone to refer to when creating pages, and also would serve to show where the source of the info was and also include the authors in some way. We should have a standard template/format for this and the other page sections also.

[brad_chuck]

What about letting people put there name after the part they write and then making that a link to a page that tells the emails of all the people that contributed.

This would be great for people that would like to add more than there email(websites or AIM). Or if there email changed they would not have to look up all the pages they edited they could just edit the one page with the names on it.

[mayakovski]

Hi All;

These are all great ideas and thoughts.

One issue I can see is how do you deal with documentation that is a derivative of someone else's original work? I am currently working on putting some docs into the install section but they are my rewording (mostly) of other docs in the HowTo section of the forum.

At what point do my changes make the document my own? Similar to the issue artists and musicians often have when creating work from other peoples work.

Maybe listing the names, if known, of all people who had a hand in the original work. Some kind of sudo credit/disclaimer at the bottom of each document. IE.

"This document is a collection of ideas and knowledge contributed to by blah, blah, blah."
Puppy Linux Documentation Project.

This works both ways, if you and only you created the document then yours is the only name listed. Otherwise any known people are listed. We could also have a disclaimer listed somewhere stating that if you find documentation that you contributed to and you are not listed, provide us with an example proving you created part of the work and we will add you in to the list, baring that we could just rewrite that section.

[puppian]

>Maybe listing the names, if known, of all people who had a hand in the original work. Some kind of sudo credit/disclaimer at the bottom of each document. IE.

How about something like this

Title of the docs page
Name of author, Contact method(s)

Content
Content

Page last edited by AAA, Contact method(s), 27 Nov 2005.

References:
Forum post A by user XX - some descriptions if needed.
Article B by user YY - some descriptions if needed.

[mayakovski]

[puppian]

I have added the things mentioned above to this page:
http://puppylinux.org/docs/pre/?Getting_Started:Window_Managers:IceWM
(that page was written long time ago and I can't remember the references )

Is everyone ok with that? If so, I'll be making a new thread to tell people about this so that those who aren't joining the committee but still want to contribute will know how to include their names, etc

[mayakovski]

Looks good to me.

I'll start using this format today. I think this will keep everyone happy. And isn't that one of the best things about puppies...

[Flash]

[puppian]

Thanks Flash
yes that new thread would be in the 'Puppy Power' forum.

[puppian]

The final template is here

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4372

It's also in the sticky welcome post of this forum.

[raffy]

Hope that template is also available at the DOCS site

[puppian]

Sure!

http://puppylinux.org/docs/pre/?TEMPLATE