Ray Saintonge wrote:
Yes. Geeks find it difficult to conceive how amazingly unobvious much of this stuff is. Help files and FAQs only manage to make the situation worse. They invariably answer all the wrong questions.
It occurred to me while wreading this that Pete's idea is brilliant, the idea of us offering to host ogg-decoder software plugins and whatever like that.
We have great skills in explaining complex topics to interested users -- that's what we do, after all, and we're pretty good at it as encyclopedists. It seems likely to me that our ogg pages (the meta pages to help people install the software) could be very professional and user-friendly, and can be updated quickly using the wiki miracle to reflect the real needs of real users.
So if the ogg pages on the net are unofficial and all scary looking, we can actually help out a great deal with that problem, while also helping to resolve our own dilemma (i.e. our concerns about inconveniencing users in our quest to evangelize for freedom).
--Jimbo