It makes you despair!

Why is some documentation so bad?

I'm trying to install some Linux software. I looked up the web site of the creators of the software, clicked the Support link and saw the main heading Documentation. This raised my spirits, but only momentarily, then I started to read. Here's how it began. I've replaced the program name with XXXX only because it comes from an open-source project, and I don't really want to shame the hapless volunteer who wrote this:

It doesn't really fill you with any faith that the links will lead you to any useful documentation. And sure enough (with the exception of one fairly decent HowTo, by current Linux standards) the documentation was as dire as the preamble leads you to expect.

The person who wrote the above extract was not a technical writer. I'm guessing (and hoping) English is not his/her first language. I suppose the answer to my question, in open source projects, is that documentation is bad because the project members are all coders, and coders who want to write documentation are very few and far between. Coders who have the necessary skills to write documentation are even rarer. The fact that too often gets overlooked is that technical writing is a specialist profession and is not something that other professionals, like developers or QA engineers, can successfully turn their hand to, when the powers that be realise there isn't any documentation for the customer.