[Meta] Allow more approved volunteers to update UE4 documentation.

General Feedback & Requests
1

As I was looking in the documentation of this article here, I noticed that there are some contents, maybe a lot of them, that is in need of an update. Especially since most of the documentation articles are all made/written with Unreal Engine 4.5 in mind, and not the latest 4.7. Because of this, I have some trouble with learning the APIs in C++, and that there are code changes that aren’t reflected upon the documentation for me to see the newest code usages.

As far as I know, the Epic Games staffs are already way busy with fixing crashes and important, crucial fixes. And thus, they do not have time to maintain the documentations to catch up on the latest versions and code revision changes.

I have a few suggestions:

  • There could be volunteers to help maintain the documentations to match the latest version, similar to how UE4 Wiki works, but in this case, the volunteers submit modified documentation articles and let the Epic Staff verify them.
  • Have a senior moderating volunteer (like Rama, etc.) who oversees the submissions, look over them, and approve the contents, while the Epic Games staff put more of their focuses onto the engine bugs and features.

I understand that the wiki lends itself for us to put more up-to-date contents, knowledge information, and more there, but this request is more geared towards the documentation and its contents not being up-to-date for new users to learn new usages in 4.7.

2

We are actively planning several things similar in nature to what you are describing.

In the shorter term, we are looking at taking feedback/updates via the forums and incorporating that into the documentation. I believe we have also added the source for the documentation to Github so we could take pull requests for updated documentation that way as well.

In the medium term, we will be moving the documentation to the wiki and plan to set up a system for allowing the community to make edits to pages that go through an approval process.

Longer term, we are researching various platforms for hosting all our learning resources in a unified and consistent environment. Part of this platform would include something similar to the submit/approve/publish workflow mentioned above.

P.S. - The team responsible for the documentation is not the same as the teams who handle fixing bugs and crashes and implementing features. It is, however, a much smaller team than those other teams which often leads to engine changes outpacing updates to the documentation over the engine. :slight_smile: