On 11/12/2011 06:41 AM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
I'm very surprised to hear that there are a communication problems (leaving Daniel's case out for now, which has different origins). The administrators (and even translators) of translatewiki.net are almost 100% also part of the MediaWiki community. We are active on code review, we hang out on IRC, we visit conferences and other events and usually responds to any questions quickly. There should be plenty of opportunities to reach us, ask questions and interact with us.
Or is the problem that people prefer written documentation to the extend that if it is not there they don't even bother to ask? I refuse to believe we are too scary to be asked (see image on [1] :).
[1] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Nike
-Niklas
Niklas, I freely admit that I don't know how extensive or thorough translatewiki's documentation is, because I am not a translator and haven't tried to use TWN to translate. But to answer your question in general, yes, people prefer written documentation and if it's not there they won't go the extra step of finding humans to ask. If I have a question about a piece of software, I look up written documentation via built-in help pages and I Google some key phrases, and if I don't find my answer, then I generally just work around the problem or give up and do something else. That is what normal people do, unless they are especially, unusually motivated to solve the problem. Experienced FLOSS users and developers are less apt to give up if there's no documentation on what they want to do, but it's still going to happen.
In general, people don't read help pages unless and until they want help, but when they want help, they assume that help pages will have all the information they need to use a piece of software. And good help pages scale better than people do (and are available 24/7 in all timezones).