This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
I have been playing with the idea of a documentation.org. Something publicly funded (mostly through corporate and individual donations) that hosts technical manuals, white papers, guides, links to video tutorials (likely YouTube), FAQs, and even links to Discord and/or forums if they exist. Documents are public, free to index (no login to view), version controlled and held in perpetuity.
Obviously there is much more to it, but I think we have reached a point where something like it is required.
Aren’t you basically describing readthedocs.io?
In the most technical terms, yes. The idea is not new or bizarre, but I see the same missteps repeated. For starters, the venture HAS to be a nonprofit with zero need for monetization. It will also need an inviting and easy to navigate user interface, accessible to the most nontechnical of users. You need to have a massive document library from multiple large players from day one, so you need to have a lot of contacts.
As I said it’s not fully cooked, but I have spoken to a few people that could help me make it happen and they seemed open to it.
First thing that comes to mind is https://devdocs.io/about
Please consider a Patreon for doc review. I don’t mean reviewing the doc against the project for fitness, as that’s the job of each project to maintain and review their own docs; I mean by a technical writer who can de-localize (you only think I mean ‘internationalize’) the document and make it syntactically and logically correct against a generic, classic style guide.
The rising popularity of really bad errors is definitely turning me off from videos or documentation from a few sources with a lot of churn. It ruins the flow and it robs the assumption of authority which I’d argue is an important part of any documentation.
That is a good idea. I am fairly certain I could get funding and/or loaned resource time for English, Spanish, French and German, but crowd funding incentivized localization for other regions is brilliant.
Also I’d rather just have these things in the repository.