Learning: BecomeAnArchivist

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Archivist

How to become ..

Friendly Introduction

Help:Editors! eZpedia needs editors!

A community members who encounter a problem which turns out to have been solved long ago, not known to the general public, or simply recently uncharted or revisited subject mater. After a time an answer may be found by one, many, most or all independently or collaboratively. The distance between the time exhausted by multiple participants over say 3 months and the time required to document a subject before setting the matter aside is astonishing.

The collaborative sway of the entire eZ publish community, the folks who wake up and find themselves thinking about something eZ related, these are the folks who are all investing (for whatever the benefit) in the 'eZ' platform, these are the same folks who upon encountering a solution have not known how best to share those experiences, situations, solutions.

Suggestions

I tend to create most of my documentation using a very simple method.

Document what you do while you work and the amount of available documentation will increase (as will your knowledge of the systems or tools you use).

  1. Be a history archivist. As you work or watch others in the various methods in the eZ ecosystem; Document all the related key pieces of the information regarding the conversation / problem and solution required to reproduce and resolve the problem (to local text file for example)
  2. Be thorough (if you can), document the participants of the conversation and the date/time (to local text file for example).
  3. Be polite. Ask for permission to submit an entry to the community documentation, Licensed using the GFDL.
  4. Be an author. Review existing nodes for example content formatting, Write up the conversation publish, maintain and promote your node!
  5. Be an editor. Review existing nodes for common spelling, formatting, linking, toc, etc errors. Document errors and or make proof-reading corrections.
  6. Be a maintainer. Maintain, revise, promote your node!
  7. Become a maintainer. Maintain, revise an existing node which has not been maintained (unless it is version specific)

The quality, medium, and quantity of available eZ publish community documentation depends on the contributions made by the very community who needs it.

I think it's a given we really want to encourage people to stop what they are doing right now mid sentence and go create their first node!

If you come back and discuss; well, that's a plus as well ...