GNOME Knowledge Base (Was: Re: Desktop Resolution)

[u07ih abdn ac uk]

> I'm willing to have a go at this - perhaps Iain could repost some of his
> suggestions that got lost in the Great Mailing List Outage.

Well, My main reason for this was that my mum got a magazine (PC Knowledge I
think), that was mainly for the computer illiterate, that had subjects like
"Understanding the Trash can", and it had an "Office Assistant" type thing that
taught you how to do things. Apparently people who don't know anything about
computers (my mum) like these things as they have someone to shout at, and type
things in as plain sentences like a web search. 

So I thought one of these things might be useful for beginnners to GNOME, but to
have it work as a natural langage query engine the answers would be better
stored in a database instead of a FAQ. 

Basically, I envisage a webpage where people can type in "How can I change the
screen resolution?" and get a sensible reply. ht/dig (www.htdig.org?) does this
sort of thing well someone told me, although I've never used it myself, also
Altavista's search engine code is open source now, so maybe that could be used
(dunno what license it's under though :). I also think that there should be
another page for people to enter their own solutions to problems they came
across - "I was trying to change the screen resolution, and I came across this
QuickRes applet at http://wherever" (for example). This could be sent to a
vefification list to check that it's not just some troll sending "GNOME sucks",
and then the article gets added to the database and indexed by the search
engine. I think by allowing this sort of submissions the database could get
populated quite quickly with a lot of information.

I would like to help, but graduating and that sort of thing are taking up all my
time at the moment :/

iain