Project:Documentation/Policy

This document contains the Gentoo documentation policy, which is the base document which all Gentoo documentation developers and contributors should know and exercise.

Introduction
The Gentoo Linux documentation team aspires to create exceptionally professional documentation that is immediately clear and concise to the end user. In order to fulfill this goal, we try to guide contributors, editors and authors through the process of creating and managing documentation, using the right set of tools.

Covered topics
This policy will cover the following topics:


 * Documentation project team organization
 * Documentation guidelines
 * Documentation team recruitment

Organization
The Gentoo documentation project team consists of editors and authors, working on our main documentation and its translations. Like most other Gentoo projects, it is led by a project lead whose additional job is to look after the team and its resources in general (such as focusing on recruitment when necessary and taking final decisions when consensus about doc-related issues cannot be found otherwise).

When the Gentoo documentation team launches any sub-projects, its mission will be made available on the documentation project webpage, along with the respective project lead.

Documentation project team members
Every member of the Gentoo documentation project must be subscribed to the mailing list. This (low-traffic) mailing list will be used to discuss all documentation-related issues. This mailing list is open to all interested parties, developer or not.

Every member of the Gentoo documentation project should try to follow up on documentation related bug reports. This can be done by either adding his or her e-mail address to the alias, or by subscribing to the bugs that are assigned to this e-mail address. This alias is only used by bugs.gentoo.org to inform the documentation team about bugs regarding the Gentoo documentation. Developers can add themselves by editing on dev.gentoo.org. Please do not use this address to try and contact the team - use the mailinglist or IRC instead, or mail the project lead or any other member.

Members of the Gentoo documentation team are frequently online in on irc.freenode.net. Note however that many developers have their chat client on that channel but might not be actively watching the channel, so be very patient when asking any questions.

Documentation translation teams
Every language should be backed up by an official translation team. This team is led by a lead translator and perhaps a follow-up lead translator. Organization of the translations is handled by the lead translator as he or she sees fit, as long as it uses the methods and processes that are documented on the translation project website.

For more information Gentoo document translations, please consult the Translation HOWTO document.

Licensing
Every document published by the Gentoo project must be licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, preferably the latest version (although earlier versions are supported too). Contributions on the wiki use this license by default.

Bugs and updates
Every bug reported on bugs.gentoo.org should be handled as fast as possible. If a bug cannot be handled in a timely fashion, the reporter of that bug should be informed about this using a comment on the bug.

Next to bugs, the wiki Talk/Discussion pages can be used to discuss updates or suggest modifications on the articles if the article itself is not modifiable by non-developers (or non-trusted wiki contributors) or when the change is large and requires some group discussion/approval before going forward.

Whenever a Gentoo documentation team member takes care of a bug, he or she should assign the bug to herself/himself, but make sure that is on the Cc-list. A bug may not be taken away from another Gentoo documentation team member without their approval unless consent has been received from the project lead.

Contributors, authors, translators
Everyone interested in contributing documentation, editing existing documentation, writing new documentation or translating documentation is welcome to create an account on the Gentoo wiki and start with their contributions. There are no rules or strings attached to this.

Recruitment process
Generally, all tasks performed by the Gentoo documentation project do not require any recruitment. The documentation development process is open to everybody. From time to time, recruitment might be needed (be it for infrastructural access or specific projects), in which case an existing developer will mentor the 'mentee' for joining Gentoo.