Re: What's a killed article ?

[Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:21:43 +0100, Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com> wrote:
> Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> writes:
>> On Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:46:22 -0600, Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote:
>> new user when you are already an experienced developer.  On the other
>> hand, if you *are* a newbie it costs nothing at all :-)
>
> Well, it costed me way too much time to get the basic usage of Gnus
> I've.

Hi Francis,

The full quote was:

    It takes a lot of empathy and practice to ``get into the
    shoes'' of a new user when you are already an experienced
    developer.  On the other hand, if you *are* a newbie it costs
    nothing at all :-)

I'm sorry if this wasn't very clear.  What I meant is that `newbies' are
often the best person to ask about documentation improvements.  They do
not need to spend any time or effort to get into the `newbie mindset',
because they are already there.

Experienced users tend to underestimate the effect of what they already
know to the way they read documentation.

> IMHO, a lots of people are likely to be discouraged when trying to use
> gnus for the first time.

That's true.  Now is the perfect time to help with Gnus documentation if
you want.  You still have the memories of being a new user, they are
still quite `fresh', and they stand a very good chance of being exactly
the same questions that another new user will have in a week or a month!

Do you keep an archive of your outgoing posts?  Maybe one way to help
would be to go through the questions you have posted here, and try to
extract the things that seemed difficult or confusing.  Then, we can try
to write some of these on the EmacsWiki.  If the collection of new user
questions seems to grow in the Wiki, it will be a nice project to look
for ways to integrate these into the Gnus manual.