[kde-doc-english] Proposal to use (docbook)wiki for docs

[Duns Ens]

Hi,

I have already posted this to the kde-devel list and on my blog here: 
http://kde.blogsite.org/?q=node/56
kde-devel comments concluded in something like: it is good idea to use a wiki 
but the wiki markup needs to be extended to get the same semantics like 
docbook has. There is also the docbookwiki project which natively supports 
docbook, but is not sure to be maintained and featured enough for this 
project. MediaWiki would need some plugins to add the necessary markup for 
docbook like semantics. Unfortunately I have other stuff to do, some plasmoids 
and smaller bugs in the pipe and cannot help myself.

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I have had an idea way back about improved documentation for KDE which I'd 
like to share since Harald has pointed out the miserable state of 
documentation in KDE. I know that ideas are only worth one cent or so compared 
to the implementation, but still I think it would be really helpful:
My idea is to use an english Wiki for documenation. This might not be new, but 
what I mean is to actually integrate the internal help with an online Wiki. 
That way users can and would write the documenation themselves. This would 
have two advantages: a) the documentation would be most likely better than 
what it is now (this is not hard to achieve...) and b) it is a much easier way 
to start to contribute to KDE than specific translation or bug hunting stuff. 
Just link from the doc page to the online Wiki for updodate docs and there 
propose to fix it if it is outdated, wrong or missing.
 Then pull the Wiki content before string freeze from the database, add 
screenshot media as uploaded by users and convert it to the docbook. Next step 
is that the maintainer reads this article *one* time and checks for mistakes 
or shortcomings as well as docbook fixes. And then move it to the translation 
team.

Guessing the interest of most developers and their personal fun factor it is 
very unlikely that the documenation will be done sanely, completely and 
reliably ever, users would be much more reliable because they are plenty and 
they use app documentation (at least a view of them) and they know what 
information they missed.
The advantage over a drop of the whole doc stuff inside KDE is that you have 
clear maintained versions shipping with each KDE version and there *are* still 
offline users around... + you don't get a versions mixup: Many distros will 
ship specific KDE versions for years and it might quite differ for lets say 3 
years = 6 KDE versions. Of course you could do online versioning only as well, 
but serious reviewed offline documentation is really more professional. I 
guess that it is a must have for the default de of the major distros, e.g. 
mandriva.

Cheers,
duns

P.S.: Originally I've although thought to link to a Wiki page from each 
KMessageBox automatically, so users can share experience with certain errors 
or infoboxes they don't know how to deal with and will make it more 
transparent where the error could be caught better. Of course this is related 
to bug reports as well.