Sorry, I’m not trying to call you out, but you’ve brought up what I think is one of the larger underlying issues with the documentation:
If you’ve been using HA for a year or more, your documentation needs and view of the documentation is vastly different that a new user today that doesn’t yet understand much about Home Assistant.
When you already have an in-depth understanding of the system through experience, your documentation needs are for reference material.
However, a new user needs overview information, tutorials, and navigation that will help them understand all the moving parts and put them in context.
Someone who wants to improve the documentation needs to put themselves in the shoes of a new user and think about what does someone who doesn’t have HA expertise need to understand.
For example, imagine you just got Home Assistant installed and want to learn how to configure it, go to the top documentation page - https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/
You see this:
Click Configuration. This brings you to https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/
There is exactly one sentence that mentions the settings page, then we are off into the deep end about configuration.yaml
that is going to be way over the head of a new user.
If you’ve been a round a long time, this may seem fine. But if you take a moment to think about that this may be one of the first documentation pages a new user visits after installation, and then think about what information should be there, this is the wrong content for this page.
A few of the things I would expect to be on https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/
:
- How to add devices to HA
- Auto discovery and what do about devices that aren’t automatically discovered
- (need to point to some place that describes what is an integration, device, entity, add-on, dashboard, card, …)
- Overview of where things are configured in Home Assistant
- Settings page
- Dashboard configuration
- Different types of configurable content
- Home assistant core
- Dashboard and card configuration
- Browser and mobile app settings
- Add-ons
- Community/3rd party components
Maybe some of this exists in other places, but not under configuration where one is likely to look
As you mentioned, creators have been trying to fill that gap with videos and blogs. But as you mention they frequently go stale. Home Assistant has a rapid pace of innovation and evolution, so this is somewhat to be expected. Videos and tend to be write once, rarely updated, except through comments, and tend to clog up search results.