The O'Reilly Radar feed pointed me to an interesting article: Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey. Note the survey part. The author has some data to back him up. Unfortunately, it is not much. 🙁 At least it shows that people enjoy community building a lot.
Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey
So, there’s the EmacsWiki, there’s OddmuseWiki, there’s an EmacsChannel, there’s an OddmuseChannel. Emacs also has more than half a dozen mailing lists and newsgroups dedicated to it. Anything we’re missing? Because that’s what I’m interested in: Drawing more people into writing documentation.
Anybody who had a problem and knows how to write should be able to share the solution, or should be able to improve existing pointers to point at the right solution, or should be able to improve discussion pages that discuss advantages and disadvantages of various approaches.
Unfortunately, the longer I’m part of projects such as Emacs and Oddmuse, the less I understand whether the tools actually work for newcomers. Does a newbie understand the Emacs Wiki? There are some people who manage to contribute a few pages and leave their names. The problem is we don’t know how many more tried to understand and failed, or understood but failed to contribute.
In a situation where theory is weak and surveys are not statistically significant, we need to resort to experiments. That’s why I think it is important to share what works and what failed, so that others do it as well, and eventually we’ll have enough information available to have a real theory of free documentation writing. ;)
#Web #Wikis #Oddmuse #Emacs
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Right. The communities and what they produce needs to be studied.
The article seems to make the important disagreement with previous studies and shorthands that conclude (assume) the “self-interested” motivations of individuals – a legacy of Raymondism *et al*. But then the article centers on a a survey of *individuals*!
– AaronHawley 2007-06-17 04:46 UTC