Talk:Documentation

Headline text

1 : the act or an instance of furnishing or authenticating with documents
2 a : the provision of documents in substantiation; also : documentary evidence b (1) : the use of historical documents (2) : conformity to historical or objective facts (3) : the provision of footnotes, appendices, or addenda referring to or containing documentary evidence
3 : INFORMATION SCIENCE [my link to Wikipedia]
4 : the usually printed instructions, comments, and information for using a particular piece or system of computer software or hardware

My comment

The last sense 4 appears to mean a set of documents related to a specific product or project especially as in software and other engineering fields. So it rather sounds like a jargon.
In other, general senses, documentation means the various activities centering around documents such as preparation, management, and provision, rather than the document itself. It even means information science!
Therefore, the following opening passage is very far from general and neutral:
``In general terms, documentation is any communicable material (such as text, video, audio, etc., or combinations thereof) used to explain some attributes of an object, system or procedure.``
The rest appears much biased to "engineering and software documentation" and that redundant, though it may be worth mentioning as a marginal part. At worst, it may be suspected of an attempt to deny the precursory role in the evolution of information disciplines including computer science. The prevailing paradigm or disciplinary partizanship of information or knowledge management is simply documentation.
Note that the American Society for Information Science and Technology had remained American Documentation Institute for 30 years until 1968 since 1937, and that the CERN Documentation Center was the very center of the greatest computing earthquake called the World Wide Web starting from 1990 on. Any discipline concerning information while denying documentation as its precursor and foundation is self-denying or self-defeating. History is history of documentation. --KYPark 14:14, 23 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]