[kde-doc-english] Writing Documentation for kdegames/kdeedu

[Philip Rodrigues]

Hi Nikhil,
Let me repeat obennett's welcome. It's great to have you :-).

> I have just started kde development and would like to start with writing
> documentation. I have just touched DocBook once, but my English is good. I
> would preferably like to contribute to kdegames or kdeedu but anything will
> be fine. The open jobs page said to contact the Documentation team so here
> it is.

We're always happy to welcome new documenters, so welcome to the team :-). 
There are lots of kdeedu docs which you could help with. It depends exactly 
what you'd prefer:

If you'd like to write new documentation, then kgeography might interest you. 
You can find the kgeography homepage at http://kgeography.berlios.de/ , and 
if you want to work on it, you can get the latest source from playground/edu 
in SVN (we can provide more details if you need them). If kgeography doesn't 
sound interesting, but you'd like to write new documentation, there are 
several other apps without docs - just ask, and together we'll find 
something.
The advantage of doing this is that you can write in plain text format, and 
we'll convert it to DocBook. This means that you don't need to learn DocBook 
for the moment, which will help you get started a lot more quickly

Alternatively, if you'd prefer to work on improving existing documentation, 
you might like to pick up kmplot. It's quite actively developed, and you can 
work with the developer to keep the documentation up-to-date. I've worked a 
little bit on kmplot, so hopefully I can help you if you run into any 
problems. This will mean you'll have to learn a little docbook, to modify the 
existing docbook files, but we can review your changes, so it doesn't matter 
if not everything is completely correct at this stage.

If neither of those appeal to you, tell us what sort of thing you might like, 
and we'll find something - there's plenty of work to do, so don't feel bad 
about asking for something different. :-)

> I can't contribute more than half an hour a day. Is that Ok?. Do I need any
> extra software? Do i need the whole KDE snapshot (data transfer doesn't
> come cheap in India)?

As obennett says, any amount of time that you can contribute is welcome. If 
you'd like to work on kmplot, you'll need the SVN version of kmplot, but you 
won't need any of the rest of KDE from SVN. If you'd like to work on 
kgeography, the latest stable version may be enough. Get back to us about 
what you'd like to work on, and we can provide all the rest of the 
information that you'll need.

Also, here are some resources that you might find useful:

We have an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net at #kde-docs. I go by the nickname 
PhilRod, and several other members of the docs team are frequently there.

The main guide for new writers is the Documentation Primer, located at 
http://i18n.kde.org/doc/doc-primer . There's no need to read all of it, but 
take a look at the first few chapters, and put it in your bookmarks :-).

Once again, welcome - looking forward to working with you,
Phil
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org
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