HOWTO: Help Notepad++ Without Coding!!! :-)

So I have seen, over the time I've been reading these forums, a predominant theme of wanting to help the Notepad++ project but not knowing how to code something or not knowing what to do.

Well yes you can donate money and that is cool.  :)  Don't let me stop you at all doing this.

There is, however, a really nice way to contribute to this open source project as well and that is to documentation.  I found the Wiki today and I though it has been sitting there for AGES (I must have been blind to it for some reason) I realized this is the key for anyone to help out.

Who can write to the Wiki?

Anyone!  It doesn't matter if you are new to Notepad++ or not!  :) 

This is the genius about bit about it:  If you are new to Notepad++ you may be a better documentation writer than you think!  It is because when you figure out how to do something you can put that into the Wiki and other people who are new and were struggling with the same things will be able to find it.

Those of us who have been using Notepad++ for a while will probably have forgotten these early day struggles and be doing allot of this stuff without thinking about it.  We will not be aware of it enough to write it down or will just assume that everyone will know that you do it a certain way.  Then again those of us who are "old hands" should be writing up the more advanced things we are learning about or using Notepad++ for.

"How else would it help just posting into the Wiki?"  You might ask.  Well some of the current developers and possibly someone in the future, who takes up the role of "Documentation Lead", will be able to pull on this fantastic resource to put together awesome documentation and help system for Notepad++.  It should free up the main developers time (especially Don's) to concentrate on coding and not worry so much about documentation.

It also is good for those who are constantly writing the same old answer to the same old question a million times to different new users.  If you are seeing these answers in the Forum allot then drag them into the Wiki polish them up and post it.  Then instead of writing the same old replay you can just answer a common question by posting a link to the relevant Wiki page.  Nice and easy!  Helps supporting questions in the Forums in other words.

So in summary this helps everyone out by letting coders code, people feel that they can contribute to the project and people have better support when asking a question.

So what are you waiting for?  Go write how to do things or improve on the Wiki!

CodeNexus

:-)

PS Don't worry about bad documentation or making some mistakes because, being a Wiki, anyone can come along and help you out by improving the page.  I think the key to the Wiki should be a feeder to the main documentation that like the source code of the project is improved over time.