[bobcoss]

There are lots of folks who are using your tools and trying the new features. Instead of having all this out of date documentation and tutorials, how about providing the user community with a wiki where users can update the documentation, and tutorials.

Whenever there is a major release, the documntation and tutorials could be branched by version, and the changes applied to the specific documentation when the users see the issues.

You could keep an official set of documentation like you do now to seed the user docs, and then combine eveything as needed.

Just a thought.

Bob

[Riyad Kalla]

Bob not a bad idea at all, I’ll pitch the idea to management and see what they think.

[Scott Anderson]

Bob,

If you have some documentation you’d like to contribute you can either post it as a forum item in the Documentation section and one of the moderators will mark it ‘sticky’, or if it’s more elaborate just zip it up and email it to us or provide a link to another location. We already have several contributors of external documentation that we link to or host.

[Christopher McIntosh]

support-scott,

I understand that if someone does create documentation independently that MyEclipse will “post it with a sticky” — but there are a few problems with that:
1) This site is very time-consuming to peruse for each visitor due to its layout…
2) It requires a phenomenal amount of time for an individual to create a document set single-handedly, and
3) Wiki (and blogging) are the tools that minimize individual effort while maximizing community benefit.

I have been a subscriber since March, but this is only my 4th or 5th visit to this site, because I have better success elsewhere in getting my own issues addressed (this is also due to the fact that most of my issues are not MyEclipse-specific). On the other hand, I visit, literally, dozens of wikis and blogs. In comparison, the amount of time spent in forums like this is inversely proportional to the benefits derived.

I want to second Bob’s suggestion for a Wiki.

[Riyad Kalla]

Machershell,
We certainly don’t want you needing to peruse Google for hours on end to get your problems resolved, a Wiki might be the way to go for us. I’ll bring this back up with the team to see if it is something we are more ameanable to now.

[Christopher McIntosh]

support-rkalla,

I appreciate the responsiveness of MyEclipse. Indeed, as I said earlier, I haven’t needed to visit these forums much, since most of my own MyEclipse issues are directly addressed by the Eclipse.org site. But I can appreciate the frustration when people who are new to MyEclipse or Eclipse visit these forums here, because the information is not always laid out according to specific product versions.

Implementing a Wiki would allow a more collaborative effort among the whole MyEclipse community, rather than the back-and-forth of forum-type support. Then, it would be easier for the community to collaborate in creating results-oriented documents. This would benefit the community. What’s more, there could be appropriate links to sites, such as Eclipse.org, when issues are discussed that are not directly attributed to the MyEclipse plugin.

I hope that MyEclipse agrees with me that a “MyEclipse Wiki” is an intelligent move that would benefit the whole community.

[Riyad Kalla]

I sent the request off to management for them to ponder. They are smart guys and want the best for the users (user happiness has been #1 focus from day one and still is). If they decide against the Wiki, it won’t be out of ignorance (e.g. management being ‘scared’ of wiki will definately not be the case), it will be out of other concerns and may be re-evaluated in another few months. Nothing is ever off the table completely, they just may decide that right at this very moment it’s not something we want to tackle, but later may fit perfectly.

[Christopher McIntosh]

Okay. So “another few months” has passed… what’s the scoop?

[Riyad Kalla]

It was well received and they thought it was a good idea. The only problems were having someone that had the time to monitor it not only for corrections but also for vandalism (e.g. someone with too much time on their hands hopping in and erasing entire pages or just making very subtle *wrong* edits to page to confuse the users).

This wasn’t something that we had the bandwidth to tackle right at the moment, but as I said, the basic idea was well liked so this may be something we look at going forward.

[Author]

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