Using userbase for manuals

[Kevin Ottens]

On Sunday 1 July 2012 10:17:21 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Diumenge, 1 de juliol de 2012, a les 09:49:11, Kevin Ottens va escriure:
> > More seriously, I think we shouldn't loose perspective here. Yes, you're
> > right, it *can* happen, but Boudewijn is also right, it's becoming rare
> > situation.
> 
> Sincerely I don't agree, having 100% internet connection each time I use my
> computer is something I don't have and I do live in Europe, I can't think
> what's like for someone in poorer regions.

Indeed, you got a point.
 
> > My opinion is that I would love to go for it, and if over time that turns
> > out to be a problem, we could ship a dump of the relevant wiki content
> > along the application. It'd be used as fallback if the wiki cannot be
> > reached online. This way we'd still benefit from the better contribution
> > scalability of userbase compared to our current situation.
> 
> And i'm going to be a pain here, but i do not agree userbase scale better
> either.
> Let's see Krita manual at http://userbase.kde.org/Krita it's translated to 7
> languages only two of them being at 100%
> 
> Now let's see KMail manual at
> http://l10n.kde.org/stats/doc/stable-kde4/po/kmail.po/
> and we have 12 at 100% and a few more over 90%

Right but that said, the number of translations is not the only metric to take 
into account regarding documentation. Overall quality of it and its coverage 
of the application features, keeping up with changes, are equally important 
IMO.

That's where I think the wiki is actually superior to the docbook stuff we're 
doing (as Boud and Eike pointed out). Now the low number of translations? 
That's likely in part because our translators are not used to look there to 
translate.

Which raises the question of: If we were to consistently use the wiki how do 
we best support our documentation translators? Would they just be happy with 
being pointed to the wiki as it is a simple enough tool? Or would they need 
the wiki content extracted as po files so that they use their current 
toolchain for translation (aka the wiki is a too simple tool)?

Both possibilities are fine IMO. Means in the second case we need to write an 
equivalent to our current docbook extractor but for the wiki somehow.

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

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