When you discover a new distro, you can explore the different menus and tools and find out what is familiar and what is new to you. But you also need some more detailed explanations of the different features which are available. Mageia’s documentation team is responsible for creating and maintaining the documentation to enable you to explore Mageia in more depth and we’d like to tell you about what we do and how you can get involved. There’s always plenty to do and every contribution, however small, is very welcome. Come and enjoy being part of an international team sharing our knowledge and love of Mageia. You’ll probably be surprised at how much you learn yourself!
As well as supervising the wiki, we’re also preparing official help pages for the installer and the Mageia Control Center, using DocBook XML and XSL. These official help pages will also be accessible inline from the help menus. They have had to be written from scratch, as we weren’t able to simply adapt the official Mandriva documentation for licensing reasons, so it’s a big job.
We need not only writers for the wiki and the official inline and online help pages but also translators, proofreaders for various languages and testers who work through the pages and make sure that the instructions are clear, correct and complete. There’s no minimum commitment needed – team members do what they can, when they can. We’d like to have some more contributors who are familiar with wiki or DocBook formatting, but this isn’t essential. If you can write some basic text or produce screenshots for a page, someone else can produce the final formatted version. Most of our pages have been put together by more than one person – it’s teamwork that gets the job done and no contribution is too small.
We also need people who use less common hardware or peripherals, such as graphics tablets, UPS, satellite connection, hard disks bigger than 2.5TB (GPT) etc, to help us produce instructions on setting them up and using them with Mageia.
If you’re interested in helping us, you can just get started writing or editing wiki pages – you don’t have to be a team member to do that and you can let us know about your contribution on our IRC channel #mageia-doc. If you’d like to join the team officially, just follow the links in the wiki to add yourself to the list of team members, then sign up to our mailing list and send us an e-mail to introduce yourself. We look forward to hearing from you!
