Let's define what Documentation is?

Madame, no I'm not, but I was only trying to explain the documentation in software projects in general. Diaspora is not only software.

Just thought I would point out that Diaspora being a Ruby-on-Rails applications does come with documented code...
For example, you can look up any of the gems in use and find documentation of it's usage.
The thing we are lacking is a clear way of defining the code that was added by Diaspora from the code that was added by gems.
Currently we are in process of that though by moving to a more "modular" architecture...

Ok. WAIT.

I don't know what I have to say to make you hear (read) what I'm trying to point out.

I can't believe that you are so thick. Come on.

Documentation for technical people is fine in the code, in a wiki, whatever or wherever. YOU ALL are savvy enough to dig and search and peel whatever you need to dig and search and peel to get under the layers of cruft to get to the answer you are looking for.

The folks I'm talking about are the SIMPLE, non-technical users.

I have been through this circle over and over again. Community IS NOT just CODERS. Or is it?

Can't you get it?

Do you REALLY think that the only people who will use this platform are CODERS or EARLY ADOPTERS, like us?

If you really want to get this project off the ground like a rocket to Mars, you have to include YOUR GRANDPARENTS as users. People like that. Get it???

You have to include people who do NOT have the time to search and search through technobabble that they cannot understand.

I'm not saying DON'T do documentation for coders, in the code or in a wiki I'm saying WHAT ABOUT all the other people who need help who just want to use the stream?

What are you doing to make it easy to find? Easy to search? Easy to understand?

Or do you just not care about that?

MP, capital letter will not help you getting trough with your message. Telling people that they are "thick" will not help your case either.

"I have been through this circle over and over again. Community IS NOT just CODERS. Or is it?" Nobody here i saying that it is, if you look at https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki you will see that Diaspora do not define community in such narrow way either.

Now, can the documentation get better for ALL members in the Diaspora community? It sure can, I think most people feel that way.

MP, if you are truly passionate about the "simple" non-technical user, why not try to find some reference project that we can use as inspiration improving that part of the Diaspora documentation? Did you visit http://elementaryos.org/support? What do you think about it?

MP, or how about Mozilla Help? E.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-browserid-and-how-does-it-work
What do think about this?

Sorry I didn't mean to be harsh. It has to do with being here already. It's the same thing as before. Community doesn't seem to include the users. Community seems to include devs and only devs. When I see as much effort being put into defining real community that is being put into looking for tools and deciding protocols, then I will change my mind. I'm not going to try to speak to people who aren't listening. There is a history of that happening already. It's not the first time. It's not my job (and only me) to make others see it. If they can't see it they can't see it.

I'm afraid I cannot write much more right now. Things to do.

Why is a wiki not a good enough documentation platform for users who aren't coders? Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world, so popular that it helped put Encyclopedia Britannica out of print, I think the average internet user knows how to use a wiki (and the search engines definitely know how to index it). MediaWiki is the exact same software Wikipedia uses, it's just a matter of structuring and organizing the documentation so that it's easy to find and easy to use.

Nobody is saying we don't need documentation for non-technical people, but to get to that point, first we have to clean up and document what we already have. If even the more technical people like developers and podmins don't have good documentation to tell them how everything works, how is anyone going to write the documentation for non-technical users?

@Steve: I agree with everything you are saying. A wiki (as a tool) isn't the problem, the problem is that there has been a rash of tools being thrown into the mix to deal with documentation and discourse (in the community) and a confusing path to find these tools. It's not the tools, it's the tool use. If you do find one of these many offsite tooks, it's not straightforward to know how to use them in a way that is acceptable, and whether the info housed in them is dependable. It is difficult to know where to find help. It's difficult to read what is the cultural norm. Maybe not for people who are tech savvy, which I'd say is all of the members here. I'm talking about non-technical users. I'm advocating for them.

If there were a wiki that gave real information, and it was kept up, and it was links to it were pervasive on the main site, then that would be a solution. But the problem is that there have been several of these tools and they are inconsistently used, they are not kept updated, it's not clear who even runs them.

What is difficult to take is that there has been a lack of discipline, perhaps because it's not "sexy" to deal with documentation, and it's not "sexy" to deal with terms of service and privacy policies. Or to discuss what kind of community (broadly defined to include all participants) that we want. But these things are the very things that are the glue to a healthy vibrant community.

My voiced displeasure is not intended to be cutting or pedantic. It is caused by my skepticism that nothing is going to change, and that the pattern of finding another "better tool" and getting into yet another wonky discussion about why one tool is better than another, is just another cycle of the same habits of excellence that got us here in the first place. Would I like to be proved wrong? Certainly!

But even Einstein said that insanity is doing the same exact thing and expecting different results.

I don't mean disrespect to anyone here in the least.

The idea is to get all these tools into one central place (that place will be joindiaspora.org), But that does take time, those tools need to be integrated in a way that allows everyone in the community to find them, use them and (if need be) edit them to keep them up to date.

As far as defining what is the cultural norm, that's something that will (and must) evolve as the community grows, nobody here can dictate what the cultural norms for the entire community can be (nor should we). I know of no document that dictates what the cultural norm is on Facebook or Twitter and people seem to have no problem using them and figuring it out, humans are social animals by our very nature and we've been figuring out ways to interact with each other for thousands of years.

You asked earlier "What do I do if someone is trolling me?" and my response would be "Is it any of my business to tell you what to do and how to interact with other people?" It would be impossible to enforce any kind of strict rules for the community as a whole, we're not building a huge monolithic site like Facebook here but a network of independent sites, but the tools are there for you to manage your interactions as you see fit (you can share with whoever you want, you can block whoever you want, you can post things as publicly or privately as you want).