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).
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation