Documentation Improvement (Thoughts, Ideas, Recommendations, etc.)

@manavgandhi17 What other platform do you have in mind? I for one would like to thank @hwurzburg for all the work he has done in the last cpl years. The documentation has really come leaps and bounds since then! I also think developers that are developing features need to lend a hand in documenting the features they are building and if there is no documentation then the features needs to be delayed until documentation is available for the feature. Manufactures need to provide clear and concise documentation of the products they are bring into ardupilot. It seems I see a lot of manufactures bring products to the ecosystem then rely on users to form the bulk of the documentation.

Sure - I think GitBook is really prevalent across multiple industries and has much better support for editing and search. They are also getting OpenAI capabilities for search in the future - which is even better for us. It will be almost as if we have a ChatGPT equivalent trained specifically on all of the ArduPilot documentation!

CubePilot Example: CubePilot - CubePilot

This could probably be added within our current service - but another benefit is that each page is tagged with when it was last updated. This could be a quick way to ā€œflagā€ pages that havenā€™t been updated in a couple years as potentially out of date.

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Hey!

Just wanted to see what the next steps were in trying to make this happen.

Should I submit a funding request based off the GitBook plans?

Full Price Info: Pricing - GitBook

Based on the comparison chart - I think the Pro plan best matches our need. Cost $12.50/mnth for each editor account plus a monthly platform fee of $82.50. Donā€™t know how many editor accounts we would need.

Would GitBook potentially eliminate the truly open source nature of the wiki? I feel that community contributions are very important.

The backend of GitBooks is a normal Github repository - so you can still submit push requests via Github (afaik). I think the paid users is mainly for those who merge in requests and get access to the editing GUI (outside of raw Github editing).

ArduSub is currently using GitBooks - maybe someone from that team can relay their experience?

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CubePilot also uses GitBook if they want to share their experience.

@proficnc

Pinging @proficnc for any thoughts.

Yet another issue related to the docs quality would be the possibility of browsing relevant parameters. I have problems with finding the critical ones among all those combinations of serial ports/gps instances/lidar instances etc. It would be great to be able to go through some list of parameters critical for the flight safety, for a quad plane, a copter etc.

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It would be good if SERIAL1_xxx SERIAL2_xxx etc. And other repeated parameters could be grouped together so we donā€™t have as much redundant information in parameters list.