Open source projects have a lot of documentation. Some professionally written, others community contributed. One thing that community contributed documentation has going for it is the passionate users that write localized content.
Localization of documentation is important. While we take it for granted that we all speak/read/write/understand the English language, a lot of people just starting out in non-English speaking areas might find it useful to read some localized content. Hook them based on their interests, and slowly they can be weaned off to other non-localized documentation, and might contribute to the localizing cause eventually, even.
Localization is also not easy. If you tried to localize the MySQL Documentation, its recommended you start with something smaller like the GUI tools, rather than the entire user manual. This because of its sheer size. I dare say, we have one of the best user manuals for any open source project out there. Its cogent, its concise.
Tamil (Indian) Documentation
But the point of this post, was really to encourage more community contributed documentation. Of late, we’ve had some Tamil documentation, that I myself can’t review, but I’m sure the collaborative and distributed nature of the Internet will enable us to find some Tamil reading people, who can write better, and longer descriptions about what’s there.
I’m sorry its a Word document. I didn’t want to convert it to a PDF because I have no idea if the fonts will break. For what it is worth, there is a supplied font that you might find useful, if you were reading it. Now, who wants to review it?
Blogs via Planet MySQL
If you read Planet MySQL, you’ll realize that quite a lot of the content there is high-quality MySQL related content. What you will also realize is that these are on individual user blogs, and its all fed based on topic and regex searches (thanks Arjen, for this!). But content within Planet MySQL disappears from the front of the page after 10 entries.
To fix this, there are the Planet MySQL Archives. If you notice, these are actually cached on Planet MySQL itself, so the content will be preserved if you move blog host, or somehow manage to be taken off the Internet. However, this isn’t a hundred percent solution, as not all the content on the Planet are actually “article material”.
So wouldn’t it be nice if all the article material were on the MySQL Forge Wiki? This way, we would have a community-based data store, with available information for all to draw on.
What are your thoughts? Is publishing on the wiki too difficult? I’m interested in hearing your comments (or even better, tell me what your blog posting workflow is like). colin AT mysql dot com works too.