Mozillazine Knowledge Base inventory part 1

[maj...@gmail.com]

During the first open meeting, I volunteered to lead an effort to take
inventory of the current Mozillazine Knowledge Base articles. This is
going to have a few aspects to it, and definitely require input and
help from others. One of the aspects is going to be taking note of
well written articles, and also pinpointing the articles that still
need some help to be awesome.

I'd like to ask people to respond here with some examples of articles
that do and don't work for them, and why. For the articles that are
great, I'd like to know what is it for you that makes them great. For
the articles that aren't great, I'd like to know what you think
they're missing. I'd like to try and emphasize what makes an article
right, rather than what makes an article wrong. Obviously we want to
know what is wrong with articles, but I think that's going to be easy
to do without trying.

I'll start with http://kb.mozillazine.org/Corrupt_localstore.rdf

The information is great and well organized. I like that the symptoms
are at the top, so people can confirm that article should help them
before they start following the fix. I would want to make a bit more
use of headers though and make it easier for users to skim, or to skip
to the solutions if they've already determined with 1on1 support that
this is the article they need.

[maj...@gmail.com]

Please reply to this article, I'm considering the other one the dupe.

[David McRitchie]

<maj...@gmail.com> wrote in message

>
> I'll start with http://kb.mozillazine.org/Corrupt_localstore.rdf
>

Well when you destroy someone's data you should tell how
to restore what they had. Symptoms have been laid out,
but not likely causes. Also perhaps something about when
one might expect problems to occur, such as major Firefox
updates -- at which time it might simply be a good idea to
rebuild the localstore.rdf before experiencing problems.

In any case would change the following:

These problems can be fixed by using either of the following methods (any toolbar customizations will be gone when you restart
Firefox):

to read:

These problems can be fixed by using either of the following methods to remove the localstore.rdf,

Because <b>all toolbar customizations will be lost</b> when Firefox is restarted and the localstore.rdf is rebuilt, it
would be advisable to take a picture of your toolbars beforehand as an aid to restoring what you want of what you had before using
View, toolbars, customize, and setting your icon size, and by moving/dragging icons onto, off of, or between toolbars.

--
David McRitchie,
Firefox Customizations: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/firefox/firefox.htm

[Jason Barnabe (np)]

I've been meaning to add a reply here for a while but then realized
why it was difficult to respond. Any time I want to critique an
article, I've done so on the article's page, and sometimes the article
subsequently gets changed.

I understood "take an inventory of articles" to mean create a
checklist of qualities an article should have, and then apply that
checklist to existing articles, rather than fully flesh out the faults
in the articles.