How can I help Improving the official documentation?

I'm currently in the proces migrating my current debian based NAS to OpenMediaVault and very happy with the ammount of time it saves me.

As a good opensource user I like to contribute to this project. Because my time is currently limited I'm not taking on any programming stuff, but I could at least update the official documentation. I noticed quit a few docs are outdated or just missing.

Also notice a few quirks on the internet when trying to find info:
- omv wiki refers to non existing pages
- omv documentation is missing crucial info for interested users (both on site and wiki)
- omv site misses a page for contributers, at least nog easy to find (e.g. Me making this post)
- the mediawiki is NOT up-to-date (could help to update it)
- the official freenas site contains a out-of-date comparison with openmediavault making omv look lame -> omv could have his own up-to-date comparison and objectively explain differences with its focus on home users
- etc

So my question is, would any help be appreciated? if so, should I first submit an update proposal for consensus or can I just submit updates somewhere?

Update: Our Proposal for the Wiki (We added some content behind it, but its not ready. Subzero and I wait for approval first)

Zitat von subzero79

I hold at at the moment a private wiki server full of information. The idea is to pass the data to @volker. Is kinda of ready (I think) but i needs redaction and spelling correction as I am no English native speaker. If you're interested send me a…

English isn't my first (or second and third) language either, but its decent so I think I will manage. Sending you that message right now. p.s. also noticed the support menu is at the bottom of the home page. Shouldn't this get a prominent place in the top menu? its kinda import and heavily used by community members.

p.s. editing my own post gives an acces violation?

No

A serious amount of time later.... Nothing has changed.

Completly my fault btw. Subzero79 did send me an experimental wiki where I could do a review on experimental content. I did some minor work on it, noticed I mostly prefer adding info instead of reviewing, noticed a minor lack of managable structure to at least have a change of maintaining it and think I really lost my motivation after that. Disclaimer: I'm business analist and have a love hate relation with my programming collegues, sometimes I get hugs, sometimes I get coffee with cream in it and they know I hate cream in my coffee... ;). A few weeks later I had both the time and motivation to continue my work and noticed the whole wiki was gone... wtf?

So here I am, motivated again to do some documentation on software I really enjoy using, mostly documenting stuff I find out on the go. Instead of doing it on my computer, I could do it somewhere everyon benefits just by adding a bit of extra documenting time. I have quit a few notes I would like to document, but no place to put it.

How about I get rights on the near empty official wiki, I put in my work, other do the same and we just model the structure as we go? and we can move the content to a new wiki when its there, getting the content is the most work. I can even try to keep the wiki specific syntax to a minimum so migrating to another wiki hasn't such a big impact. For this I promisse not being such a big pain in the ass as I am on my work, deal?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

@votdev should be able to give you access.

That would be great.

Zitat von subzero79

I didn't remove the wiki, the problem is that i pay a cheap domain, and those one increase the fee after two years so I dismissed and purchase another cheap one. I forgot to add the dns entry for the wiki prefix.

I changed now and the wiki should be at the same prefix/name domain with a different TLD (.pw)

The certificate there was from Let'sEncrypt and now is expired.

That would explain it ;). Can I still use my credentials you gave me earlier?

I actually have a hosting provider I don't use anymore since I stopped freelancing in software development, except for forwarding mail of one of my domains. If you want to save a few bucks i'll be happy to share a piece of the pie there. Also have a developing server running (playing with fuchsia and dart there), but that one gets spooled every 2 months or so, but its way faster and has about 4 TB of space. We could also use that, omv is running there in a vm to ;).

Whats the plan with that wiki? What do we need to deliver before that wiki gets official/public? I find it less then optimal to work in a wiki that is not shared with the community, so we all can benefit from others their insights. Mind you, I'm quit bussy with work, kids, family, sports (pro lifter), friends... but i can put in some work ones every while.

My previous look at the wiki gave me an impression what to do. But I should first talk with you about some idea's to structure our information before I put in more info. Would this thread be a good place for that?

Hey, late reply, for some reason didn't got a notification about it.

What do you mean with needing votdev his opinion? does he need to give it for your wiki plans or my request to have a public wiki in its current state? As soon you answered this question Ill start with the wiki again.

P.s. Looking at the valueable information in the forums I don't think we are the only ones who want to organize the information. Currently playing with snapraid and greyhole, can believe there isn't more information about that on the site, awesome plugins. Can wait to describe those.

Can we ask him about both the content and the wiki engine?

I asume he is not content yet with the content, i'm more interesten to know if we can do our task in a public wiki and like to be sure the content we make is used. You already spend a lot of time on it and i'm planning to.

Update: Working with subzero on the wiki, to be honest the most import stuff was already there.

Added
- added bits and pieces to existing stuff
- install howto updated
- added wiki guidelines, to get consensus on how to set it up and manage it all... most wiki's are an unusable mess.

Doing some restructuring now (when time permits, rough time management with work and competitions), my current small goals are:

• Decomposition of information. Like lego to reuse information as often as possible without having (almost) duplicate allinea's, paragraphs and howto's (hard to keep up-to-date and looks more complex for beginners)
• Focussing right now on completing the beginner stuf, from install to basic configuration. Again most is there already, putting the dots on the i.
• considering adding an howto specially for the raspberry pi (decomposition helps again ;))
  
  
  • This might help the beginners who like an extremely cheap nas (both the hardware and power costs)
  • Having a spare at the moment (leaned out my home-automation/domotica... kinda went into overkill there). The transfer rates are low, but my rough estimate says its should be enough for small fileserver, backup, etc usage, mediaserver would allow for 2 to 3 HD streams when using plex or something (ill test it later, just guessing here... 100mb isn't... ehm... super bad).
• added todo tags (just search for todo:)

Question: i see this beta-wiki already exists for over a year, what would be needed for a MVP that can go live?

p.s.
@subzero79 Just noticed that since the wiki update the <WRAP important> tags don't work anymore.

Zitat von gabs247

Just noticed this post, and had a quick look: http://wiki.openmediavault.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Cool, I think this will be very useful to build upon. If I don't write things down, I forget them very quickly, and I know I'll be caned for this but I prefer a guide/wiki to searching a forum for answers

Actually, the new main page subzero and I made will be something like this, the goal is to make it more user friendly and easier on the eye. Its a work in progress though.

• The new mainpage needs to be reviewed first to get officially permission to stay, its just a concept right now.
• There are a few icons missing currently (they now have a document icon).
• After the review a lot of new content will be added that we already worked on (some stuff is already added).
• We are going to index the howto's made by the community (really great stuff in this forum that should be more visible / findable). Findable based on feature group and/or topic (we are discussing several idea's)

Any idea's or suggestion would be appreciated

Also links to excellent howto's would be helpfull.

p.s. I hate searching forums for stuff to, but for some reason the best howto are always in the forums for any opensource projects. Seem logical to go with the flow and just make them more findable instead of asking people to put them on the wiki (a wiki is bit less approachable, people feel often their howto isn't good enough and on the other side to much content makes it chaotic).

- just my point of view, also not official