[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

It's not like learning terminology is hard. Humans are set up for that sort of thing. Do you know the parts of a book? There's a cover, sometimes with a dust jacket, there are pages which may be fixed in signatures, there's a spine, page numbers, perhaps a table of contents and an index, and so on.

And I don't mind learning the vocab. It's just that a lot of geek fields don't have a Geeklang-to-English glossary; they have a dictionary written in Geeklang that describes terms in relation to each other. I can tell when I've reached a scientific topic on Wikipedia, because the opening paragraph is incomprehensible. (See light. Or worse, wavelength. Twitch. Good thing I already know what those are, because I'd never be able to figure it out from those explanations.)

When I need to, I study the terminology enough to figure it out. It's easier if it's in a field I have a connection to or direct interest in, but it's not impossible to start from scratch. (However. There's a reason so many authors provide a glossary in the backs of complex world-building books.)

That's what I find so ridiculous about people trying to claim that a specialty's precise terminology (and it's almost always computer-related) serves as some kind of shibboleth to keep out the uninitiated. Terminology is the easy stuff.

No, it's just the first hurdle. Which, if it's high enough, can make the field not worth entering. And I can understand not providing it; those terms are used because they're effective; rephrasing them in non-technical terms means basically describing them wrongly.

I've written a basic Pagan-to-English vocab guide; it was weird realizing how much it felt like dumbing down or glossing over the important parts. And how much I left out, because "basic" kept trying to explode. I eventually decided that, anyone who wanted more than basic knowledge would have enough vocab not to get themselves shouted out of the places where more advanced details are available, and they could find that info on their own.

And a Calibre glossary could have the same intent--just enough vocab to be able to ask for help coherently, and to allow for easy absorption of other new terms.

So, back to the topic at hand, what we need isn't to translate technical terms into "computer TV set"-speak for users; we need to provide adequate explanations of those technical terms so they can understand what other documentation means, and use the terms themselves. That gets everyone on the same page. Perhaps a glossary section of some kind could address this.

I'd like that; I don't think we need a complete "Calibre for Dummies" book, but a page or two of vocab for people who don't come out of a programming background would be helpful.