<div dir="ltr"><div>Would a wiki really help make the documetnation better? Wouldn't there be less quality control in regards to a wiki. Who would control what went on the wiki, how would the wiki deal with spam? Is it really that hard to contribute to KDE-Docs? We have this converstation all the time with ubuntu-docs as well.</div>
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<div>How would documentation on the wiki translate into a help manual for offline access? Not everyone has high speed or constantly connected documentation. How does the documentation on wiki translate into documentation on the client in a help manual?</div>
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<div>If a distro links to the documentation currently (as the Kubuntu docs do) how do you deal with this downstream? </div>
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<div>As far as I know there is currently not a wiki -> docbook plugin that works constistent, once again something the Ubuntu Doc team has tried to get to work correctly in MoinMoin -> Docbook and also Docbook -> MoinMoin.</div>
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<div>Jonathan<br><br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Duns Ens <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dunsens@web.de">dunsens@web.de</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Hi,<br><br>I have already posted this to the kde-devel list and on my blog here:<br><a href="http://kde.blogsite.org/?q=node/56kde-devel" target="_blank">http://kde.blogsite.org/?q=node/56<br>
kde-devel</a> comments concluded in something like: it is good idea to use a wiki<br>but the wiki markup needs to be extended to get the same semantics like<br>docbook has. There is also the docbookwiki project which natively supports<br>
docbook, but is not sure to be maintained and featured enough for this<br>project. MediaWiki would need some plugins to add the necessary markup for<br>docbook like semantics. Unfortunately I have other stuff to do, some plasmoids<br>
and smaller bugs in the pipe and cannot help myself.<br><br>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>I have had an idea way back about improved documentation for KDE which I'd<br>
like to share since Harald has pointed out the miserable state of<br>documentation in KDE. I know that ideas are only worth one cent or so compared<br>to the implementation, but still I think it would be really helpful:<br>
My idea is to use an english Wiki for documenation. This might not be new, but<br>what I mean is to actually integrate the internal help with an online Wiki.<br>That way users can and would write the documenation themselves. This would<br>
have two advantages: a) the documentation would be most likely better than<br>what it is now (this is not hard to achieve...) and b) it is a much easier way<br>to start to contribute to KDE than specific translation or bug hunting stuff.<br>
Just link from the doc page to the online Wiki for updodate docs and there<br>propose to fix it if it is outdated, wrong or missing.<br> Then pull the Wiki content before string freeze from the database, add<br>screenshot media as uploaded by users and convert it to the docbook. Next step<br>
is that the maintainer reads this article *one* time and checks for mistakes<br>or shortcomings as well as docbook fixes. And then move it to the translation<br>team.<br><br>Guessing the interest of most developers and their personal fun factor it is<br>
very unlikely that the documenation will be done sanely, completely and<br>reliably ever, users would be much more reliable because they are plenty and<br>they use app documentation (at least a view of them) and they know what<br>
information they missed.<br>The advantage over a drop of the whole doc stuff inside KDE is that you have<br>clear maintained versions shipping with each KDE version and there *are* still<br>offline users around... + you don't get a versions mixup: Many distros will<br>
ship specific KDE versions for years and it might quite differ for lets say 3<br>years = 6 KDE versions. Of course you could do online versioning only as well,<br>but serious reviewed offline documentation is really more professional. I<br>
guess that it is a must have for the default de of the major distros, e.g.<br>mandriva.<br><br>Cheers,<br>duns<br><br>P.S.: Originally I've although thought to link to a Wiki page from each<br>KMessageBox automatically, so users can share experience with certain errors<br>
or infoboxes they don't know how to deal with and will make it more<br>transparent where the error could be caught better. Of course this is related<br>to bug reports as well.<br>_______________________________________________<br>
kde-doc-english mailing list<br><a href="mailto:kde-doc-english@kde.org">kde-doc-english@kde.org</a><br><a href="https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-doc-english" target="_blank">https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-doc-english</a><br>
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