Rewriting Manifesto/Comments

Main Manifesto Page

The goal of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is to create and distribute a canonical set of high quality free GNU/Linux documentation.

While GNU/Linux applications and utilities may come with their own documentation, LDP documentation aim to fills in numerous gaps.

The hundreds of existing LDP documents present both overviews and details of: the GNU/Linux operating system, system administration, hardware, networks, servers, GUIs, programming, language support, etc. Not every important topic is currently covered, so LDP is seeking new authors to fill in the gaps.

An additional goal is to collaborate on all issues of GNU/Linux documentation. We hope to establish a high quality system of documentation that is easy to use and search. This includes integration of a commented list of all the major documentation sites with similar goals.

The LDP wants trustable, accurate, understandable, friendly, neutral and open documentation.

Trustable

LDP documentation needs to be trustable. That's why we try to have identified authors. The author is the first person who attests to the quality of the documentation. Wiki documents have to be certified before being inserted into the standard LDP document collection;

Accurate

LDP documentation needs to be true, exact documentation. To achieve this, we first date the documentation. A document can be accurate at a given date and stay so for the product described, but technology might change. We need to keep the old doc for all the users of the old version, or for historical reasons, but then write new updated docs for the new technology;

Understandable

LDP documentation has to be understandable by the public it aims at. We help writers, to makes this job easier;

Friendly

LDP documentation has to be friendly; that is, the writing style is better if the reader finds it appealing and likes to read it;

Neutral

LDP documentation gets read by all sorts of people from all over the world. Nothing in it should make anybody uncomfortable. This documentation maybe even have to be operating system neutral. Open source applications are now available on any OS, including Windows, Mac OSX, etc. Nobody using these system should feel offended reading any LDP document.

Open

Of course, LDP documentation have to be "open", in the "open source" meaning.

The LDP is essentially a loose team of volunteers with minimal central organization. Anyone who would like to help is welcome to join in this effort. We feel that working together informally and discussing projects on our mailing lists is the best way to go. When we disagree on things, we try to reason with each other until we reach an informed consensus. The LDP wiki is the center for hosting the result of the discussions.

Being a loose team, the LDP is not incorporated in any country and can't hold the copyright for the documents. Anybody can join the team at any moment and quit at any moment.

We freely distribute our documents via the Internet.

If you are interested in publishing any of the LDP works, see the section "Publishing LDP Documents" below.

We favor the ''author driven'' model. Any HOWTO must have an author, responsible for the final content, even if the HOWTO is on the wiki and editable by all. Linux distributions are invited to include this documentation in their support materials.

The LDP will do all what is posible to maintain his doc is a manner that makes it easy to store, duplicate, convert it to as many file formats as possible, mainly using a standard format as source.

The LDP will favour all possible means of translation of contributors' documents into as many languages as possible.

This is acheived through this wiki and use of docbook as primary storage format. This don't mean authors are obliged to write in these formats (not even in the wiki format). Authors can use any format convertible to Docbook by any of the large number of backends. Linuxdoc is one of these formats, full text is an other.

However, authors are urged to use structured document layout to make the document maintainable.