Rosetta documentation

[Anonymous]

Dear Rosetta community,

is there any way to improve the Rosetta documentation for people who are not actively involved in the development?
For people who are not intimately familiar with Rosetta and it’s inner organs it is quite hard to use the Rosetta suite by reading the documentation only.
To quote smlewis “Don’t kid yourself – our documentation is terrible!”, although I disagree with “terrible” I think there is still room for improvement, e.g. the Constraint File Instructions documentation mentions the use of ambiguous constraints by using “Ambiguous” while the correct constraint is “AmbiguousConstraint” according to https://www.rosettacommons.org/content/p-p-docking-suitable-constraint-type .
I think it might be helpful to newbies to include more sample files with explanations or commonly encountered problems (might also save time to answer the same questions over and over in the forum).

I’d be more than happy to contribute.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

For example, make a Rosetta wiki like PyMOL wiki:
http://pymolwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

The current documents will be used as the stem. Users can contribute their own docs or scripts.

[Anonymous]

If you see small errors like that, you can submit bugs (after making an account) at the Rosetta bug tracker at http://bugs.rosettacommons.org

Regarding more general editing of the documentation, I think there may be legal (e.g. copyright) issues with opening up the distributed documentation to public editing. It’s certainly something to think about, but I’m not sure if it will ever happen.

That said, as long as you don’t copy-paste content from the official documentation, I don’t believe there is any limitations on the general community putting together a non-affiliated “fan” wiki for Rosetta with tips/tricks/documentation/demos. As I understand it, that’s how the PyMolWiki and the Foldit Wiki on Wikia came into being – they weren’t started by the people in charge of PyMol/Foldit, but instead came out of the user community.

The one thing to keep in mind is that if you want to keep open the possibility that such documentation would be folded back into the official Rosetta documentation, the license has to be permissive enough to mesh with the Rosetta license. That would rule out any “share alike”, “non-commercial”, or “no derivatives” terms. (So no GFDL or many Creative commons licenses – CC-BY is probably okay, though I’m not a lawyer, so don’t quote me on that.) — Though if you don’t care about having it ever distributed with the official release, then that’s less of a concern.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the comments!

The problem I see if an individual would open another “non-official” wiki is the lack of traffic/edits. If all the information is in one single place it is easier to find and more likely to be edited. Without copying&pasting the whole manual the ‘fan’ wiki would be pretty useless because users would have to jump from the wiki to Rosetta manual back and forth.

[Author]

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