How to contribute documentation?

[SwamiUmami]

As a person who wants to help develop Soldat, I want to know how I can contribute documentation.

Why do I need documentation?
When running Soldat for the first time, I wanted to change configuration, but I could not find much documentation. By default, the client window is too big on my screen and I can't see status bars (health, ammo, jets, ...), so I had to change r_screenwidth and r_screenheight cvars. I think it would be good to have an organized wiki page that could help new developers and Soldat players migrating to 1.8.0. For example an explanation of cvars would be nice, but I believe there are many other topics that can be documented (game's directory tree, how are game files stored, ...).

Where should documentation be?
I see many options:

• Soldat launcher. This is good for client, but not so much for server configs
• Soldat's new webpage
• Soldat wiki
• GitHub wiki. Maybe it would make collaboration easy with git. There is already a good guide for devs
• Soldat's manual
• GitHub Pages?

When making this decision, ask yourself if 1.7.1 content should be mixed with 1.8.0, or maybe it's better to separate them? Also, maybe new documentation could be included in Soldat's releases too?

How can people contribute?
It would be good to have some guidelines and information about contributions. It applies both to code and documentation. For example who reviews contributions, and who merges them? Or who takes responsibility for this project and what is the team structure (if any)?

I suggest following tasks:

• Decide where to store documentation
• Create a CONTRIBUTING.md page with guidelines and explanations
• Create documentation for cvars. I can do this

[BranDougherty]

Of course all the new systems need to be documented before release, it would be fantastic to get that process started.

Where should documentation be?

The simplest thing is to just use the GitHub wiki, so let's start there. That way we can focus on the 1.8-specific documentation first, and not mix it with the 1.7.1 documentation the community is currently using. Also nontechnical users can still contribute, as long as they are willing to make a GitHub account. It probably wouldn't be too hard to move docs from the GitHub wiki to the soldat.pl wiki via pandoc anyways, I think the most important thing is to just get started.

Also, maybe new documentation could be included in Soldat's releases too?

I'm partial to just a few README files with basic explanations and links to the online documentation myself.

How can people contribute?
It would be good to have some guidelines and information about contributions. It applies both to code and documentation. For example who reviews contributions, and who merges them? Or who takes responsibility for this project and what is the team structure (if any)?

Yes these things are all ambiguous right now, and a CONTRIBUTING.md file is a good solution to that.