Using userbase for manuals

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello,

On Sunday 1 July 2012 08:02:28 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> I'm actually not sure kde-core-devel is the right list... But the e.V.
> mailing list certainly isn't, and we don't seem to have any place for
> discussions that affect KDE as a whole.

Well, I think nowadays the name of kde-core-devel is confusing. The customs 
made its focus evolve over time, I think nowadays it's really the forum where 
the different KDE teams meet. It's really "kde-townhall" IMO. Anyway... I'm 
sidetracking a bit. :-)

> In any case, Ingo Malchow said in his blog
> (http://blog.neverendingo.de/?p=125)
> 
> "We have a great userbase.kde.org but developers don’t use it that much, nor
> is there any links from applications towards Userbase."
> 
> Well, actually we have. I replaced the offline help documentation in Krita
> with a link to the manual on userbase. I have done this for two reasons:
> 
> * I couldn't maintain the offline manual anyway after the change to 2.0
> * this way the user gets sent right to the place where they can contribute
> to the manual (and I've got users contributing to it now)

I think that would be a great improvement. The current way we deal with user 
documentation just doesn't scale. Trying to foster at this easier to 
contribute even from users documentation would help greatly with that. If we 
can get more user engagement that'd be a win for our community.

> I'm not concerned that users cannot access the help when they are off-line.
> That's a vanishingly rare situation these days, the big thing is that it
> gets users right where they can fix the manual (Except on windows, where
> the browser invocation seems broken).

I fully agree there.

> After yesterday's discussion where David said that for frameworks/qt5 the
> help center invocation is actually one of the trickier things, I'm giving
> this out for consideration for other app developers...

Thanks a lot for stepping up to bring up the matter. Highly appreciated.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud patron of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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