Documentation Metrics

["David C. Merrill, Ph.D." <dcmerrill@mindspring.com>]

I am working on the set of metrics to be used in reviewing our documents.
Here is what I've come up with so far. Please send me your suggestions to
improve this. I have had one person volunteer to help me with this process
so far (thanks Nelson), and would like to have at least 2 more volunteers.

1. Audience Type
- application user
- programmer
- system administrator

2. Audience Technical Sophistication
- novice
- beginner
- intermediate
- advanced

3. Accuracy
- awful
- poor
- fair
- good
- excellent

4. Comprehensiveness
- sketchy (a few bare facts)
- adequate (good amount of information)
- comprehensive (complete coverage of the subject)

5. Source Format
- DocBook SGML
- DocBook XML (none currently, I think)
- LinuxDoc SGML
- HTML
- text
- texinfo
- whatever else you find

6. Style
- obtuse
- readable
- accessible

7. Language (grammar and spelling)
- awful
- poor
- fair
- good
- excellent

8. General Information
- author's name and email
- current maintainer's name and email, if different from the author
- version, if there is one
- date of last update

9. Currency
- badly out of date
- slightly out of date
- up to date

I would like to assemble this information into a spreadsheet that I can work
with, and I am planning on using Gnumeric for this.

Once I have this basic information assembled for each document, I will know
the areas that need the most work. Then, I'll start by dealing with the
worst problems first.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I might approach this better.

--
David C. Merrill, Ph.D.
Linux Documentation Project
Collection Editor & Coordinator
www.LinuxDoc.org



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