[kde-community] Improving the TechBase Wiki to help new contributors getting involved in KDE

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 4:24 PM, Mathieu Tarral <mathieu.tarral at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone !
>
>
> I would like to raise your attention to the state of the TechBase Wiki.
>
> The main purpose of this wiki is to contain the technical information
> needed by new contributors and everyday developers to get involved in
> the project, and stay up to date with new development procedures.
>
> KDE has been moving very fast lately, thanks to the hard work which has
> been accomplished with the jump to Frameworks and Plasma5.
>
> The TechBase wiki can be seen as the main entry point for any new
> contributor willing to dive into KDE development.
>
> Therefore, it should be as clear and intuitive as possible, keeping in
> mind that contributing at the source code is a hard task for newcomers,
> because the more difficulties they encounter in the process, the more
> they will give up.
>
> In my opinion, the actual structure of the wiki is not very intuitive
> and can be improved.
>
> For example, the "Discover" section contains a link for sysadmins and
> advanced users, but it's not related to development.
>
> Also, in the "interact" section, we have a link for information
> regarding ISV. Maybe we could put it somewhere else, since it concerns
> a very specific part of the users ?
>
> And there are links on "how to contribute" which are repeated all over
> the wiki.
>
> This just for the front page.
>
> I would be pleased to have a general feedback from the KDE community
> about the state of the TechBase Wiki, how it is structured, and how it
> may/should be.
>
> Thanks !
>
> --
> Mathieu Tarral

Thanks for writing about this, Mathieu. While trying to use Techbase
intensively last summer to get the Frameworks book off the ground, I
found some parts up-to-date and easy to find, and other parts terribly
out of date, and confusing.

It seems that finding the old parts (KDE3, and now KDE4) and tagging
them properly would allow them to be moved to their own section, where
they can be mined if necessary as we create new pages for Frameworks
and Plasma 5.

Many new users will go directly to Tutorials. There really is a glut
on the Tuts pages, rather than a clear way in for new devels. To me
this would be the most important to clean up first. Move those older
tutorials aside, and set the new ones in a logical, systematic way to
get our students up and running with the least pain possible.

I'm going to add KDE-www to the CC list since this concerns our web presence.

Valorie