I’m +0 as I’m pretty sure that the reason why people don’t contribute more is not that they don’t know that they can but that most people don’t want to break things and don’t know the overall doc structure.
We do have contributions every week to the doc or minor changes. And we’re already pretty good on the doc for each feature/change (it’s even in our process to be able to release!). Where we’re less good is the general structure of the doc, updated screenshots, clean up of old stuff, etc. ie stuff that are hard to conrtibute to if you’re not an expert.
In addition, people are usually afraid to make mistakes.
Moreover, people who don’t find the doc good are usually those who don’t contribute and have no incentive to do so.
So while we could add this panel, IMO it only bloats the web site, and is duplication for the contributing guide (where anyone who wants to contribute would go for sure).
IMO something that could help a little bit (but not much, don’t get overcarried :)) is adding the CR extension to xwiki.org:
- It makes it easier to contribute by NOT requiring to create an account (this is a deal breaker for people who just want to fix a typo or do some small change)
- It would allow people to propose changes and not be afraid of breaking stuff. We’ve discussed it countless times but we still need to fix one issue before we can use it on xwiki.org
Another idea (but it also wouldn’t change much IMO), is to implement gamification and give points to contributions (doc update being a contribution) and with the points grant rewards. I made a proposal several years ago and even implemented a POC during a hackathon but it’s a lot of work, and in the end I don’t believe it’ll change anything substantially.
My personal view, is that documentation is a difficult topic, there’s not enough incentive for people to contribute to it substantially (not more than contributing to coding). The reason why translations work is because people get incentives: they get their wiki in their language and they need it. Improving the doc means figuring out the answer to what you’re looking for and when you have the answer, the incentive to contribute it back is lower. Some people will do it but that’s not the majority.