Let's define what Documentation is?

Thank you Florian, I have not seen one line of the Diaspora source yet, I could not know.

@Florian et al: I do not try to pretend that I know what I'm talking about! :) But I have heard others frustrated about a lack of documentation. Now if that is comments or that is a offsite repository (like a wiki) explaining what does what I can't say. But that speaks to the spirit of defining what we mean when we are Talking about documentation.

It doesn't seem useful to use the word documentation in a way that is too broad when the speaker is talking about comments in the code, for example. See what I mean?

He that was a really exhilarating characterization of how diaspora works :) @Florian ... good laugh! - ten points

I am optimistic as a community governed project we can improve so it counts as a "well documented project"

madame, in software projects the usal documentation is the following: (1) requirements, (2) design, (3) technical and (4) end user.

@altruism: Ok. There are 4 branches of documentation. Could you define them a little more? :)

MD, 1) foundation for what shall b implemented, (2) overview of software components, (3) code, algorithms, interfaces, api:s etc, and (4) for support, sys admins, users.

It seems that 4) is too general. I mean there is support to help a user know what this or that button will do. But what if there is something not related to code? Something that is more cultural based? Like a primer of what to do if you are trolled? Where would that go? It doesn't seem that that would fit in any of these 4 branchs, you know?

In software there are bugs, no trolls :)

So are we only talking about code?

If you look at our current wiki, it's divided into different segments:

1.) Developers
2.) Community
3.) Podmin Resources
4.) Guidelines and Policies

Each of these sections are further broken down into specialized sub-sections, covering quite a range of topics.

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki

This could probably be tweaked more for the sake of granularity. I think some kinds of documentation belong on a subdomain, separated from the rest of the wiki for very specific purposes. (documentation on an API could be located at api.diasporaproject.org, federation and architecture explanations could be at developer.diasporaproject.org, and a robust field guide could be put together covering running and working with Diaspora at docs.diasporaproject.org, with instructions on how to modify it yourself, for example)

Each of these subdomains could be linked from the frontpage of a redesigned central site. Some good examples of how this is done:

-Gnome Project (Gnome.org)
-The Elementary Project (http://elementaryos.org/)
-The KDE Project (http://kde.org/)
-To a lesser, but still useful, extent, the Ubuntu project (http://www.ubuntu.com/community)

Each of these designs maintain two different things, and do a pretty good job of it:

1.) A visually attractive front-end
2.) A design that showcases what's going on in a community, while also not forgetting to link to important resources.