The most convincing answer I can make, is to suggest you try writing one. (In Romanian, don’t worry about translations for now.)
Your audience consists of crusty old engineers like me, smart-a** comp-sci grad students looking to poke holes in your work, your fourteen-year old niece, and your mother-in-law who thinks touching the computer will probably break it and has no idea what a modem is. One of them is a soldier on an army base where they absolutely forbid P2P (and regard anyone who assists anyone else as equally guilty), while another is running Win98 on a 486-66 laptop in a childrens’ leprosy clinic in Idunnoistan, and doesn’t speak any language you know but there’s a young boy who’s been helping her do this as her sole source of recreation. Then there’s the woman who has a thought-powered 5 TB/s network connection in her brain, (which was written up in last month’s “Cyborg Beautiful” magazine). She expects you to know all about it and wants your help configuring BC for it.
Which edge=cases are you going to include/exclude, and how do you justify it? They’re your lines to draw, but you do have to draw them SOMEwhere. You have to write to all of these while taking care not to insult any of them or offend their intelligence while staying out of legal or political trouble yourself. Oh, and actually doing some good. You remember, trying to actually help anyone with their connection speed?
By the time you accomplish all this, the document will have grown so large that it scares half your audience away by its sheer size.
Links? You want to link to sites? The average half-life of a link on the internet is six months. That means that after six months, half the of those links will be broken because the site is dead, or has been rearranged so that whatever you linked to is no longer at that URL, or even there at all.
So you’ll have to maintain the document constantly, or decide to just abandon it and let link-rot make it gradually irrelevant. Or maintain it for a while, get sick of it, and try to pass it on to somebody.
You’ll need some feedback mechanism, because without it you won’t know what parts worked and what didn’t. That means some way to contact you that doesn’t drown you in email spam.
You’ll have to refuse helping on an individual basis, but you’ll get asked anyway. How will you deal with that?
You’ll want some sort of copyright on it, or people will take your work and delete your name from it.They may do that anyway. They may even lift chunks of it wholesale, and publish it as theirs. What will you do about that?
And, btw, you’re doing all this for free.
As Microsoft would say, “Are you sure?”
