KDE Wikis: where should I write?

Hi there,

TL;DR

If you don’t know, go there first: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Documentation_in_wikis

Some documentation issues

I’ve been asked a lot lately about some directions to document new projects in KDE.
I’ve seen as well an awesome tutorial being published on Planet KDE, with a very wrong address.

To counter that I wrote a page [1] that explains everything in details. If it’s not enough, just ping me and let me know.

A recap of previous episodes

During the sprint at CERN, we worked at a logical organization of our wikis [2].

On the Community wiki (https://community.kde.org), you’ll find a Guides and HOWTOs page, in which we try to centralize all the generic tutorials for KDE newcomers (and old ones as well :D). Go there whenever you have questions, take the time to read the pages, correct them if needed, add new ones if you think something is missing.

Even Specially if you’re new to KDE, write tutorial about what you find unclear, and ask us for review. You are the ones who know what information is missing!!

Cheers and have fun !
Olivier

Links

[1] https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Documentation_in_wikis
[2] https://blogs.churlaud.com/somefoobar/2016/03/17/we-reorganized-most-of-the-wikis-we-need-you/

We reorganized (most) of the wikis, we need you!

…This post explains in more details what have done on the Community and Techbase, and what belongs where…

So we worked a lot on Community and the structure changed. It’s what I want to write about here.

More details can be found here:

• https://community.kde.org/Help:Contribute
• https://techbase.kde.org/Help:Contribute

What goes where?

What goes in Community?

You have a KDE project and need a place to coordinate, explain how to build from source or give some code guidelines, please write it under https://community.kde.org/Your_Project and add it (if it’s not already the case) on the front page, where it belongs. This is where the contributors of this project should go to find information about it.

So what goes in Techbase?

In Techbase we thing in term of products. If you have a product that can be build on or extended by third parties (plugins, API, scripting,..) then you should document how to extend it or build on top of it. We are working on a tutorial about this to help you to write this type of documentation. Basically an external developer needs to know how the library work (API), have a high level overview of what can be done (and why), how to troubleshoot or debug when it doesn’t work, how to get help. Of course you can (should?) add a link to you community space to push them to contribute to your project…

You should keep in mind, that this is a reference for people who are not in the KDE community: they are users of your technology. It’s more than possible that your Community space will link to the documentation in Techbase because contributors need this information as well.

What is still to be done?

On our side

Some projects are still hidden in Techbase, and need to be moved to Community. When it’s done we contact you to sort and merge them with your current documentation.

The tutorial section on Techbase is still messy, and we are slowly reorganizing them (see the Guidelines and HOWTOs page). It won’t be all on community! The documentation on, say, how to localize a program with Ki18n definitely belongs to Techbase, whereas how to use git on our infrastructure doesn’t.

We are working with the VDG team to organize cleverly Techbase frontpage

Still some links are red, we are trying to correct that as fast as we can.

On your side:

It really depends on your project and products but overall:

• Check that your links to the wikis are still up to date in your websites.
• Maybe take this opportunity to be sure all your documentation is up-to-date? Delete old or irrelevant pages?
• If you are concerned, add your product to the Techbase front page and begin documenting
• Tell us if something is missing, should be enhanced or anything else (but with argumentation please… no “Better before, it was” will be accepted 🙂

We really need you for this!

This said, as usual:

Cheers and have fun!

PS: Consider supporting KDE e.V.! It might be small for you but it’s great for the community.
Via Paypal for one-time donations
Become an ongoing supporter and official supporting member

Sprint at CERN: things got done!

Whhoooo! Almost one week before I only gave a thought to write this post.
Reading myself again, I think I have to much to say… Let’s split so that you don’t get (too much) bored 🙂

The sprint

This sprint was my first meeting with KDE contributors. I broke the first rule my parents told me about internet: “Do never meet the people you are chatting with on the web!”. Anyway it was a really, really good experience.

We had good food (thank you W2L!), we had a lot of noise (thank you W2L!), and we had a productive team (thank you @alexmerry, @fringing and @rharisch!).

As I already wrote in previous posts, my team was working on reorganizing and updating Techbase [1].
When we planned this we decided do focus on this wiki only. But nothing worked as planned…we just did a lot more!

First steps

KDE operates three wikis:

• https://userbase.kde.org
• https://community.kde.org
• https://techbase.kde.org

If the content of the first one was really easy to define, it wasn’t so clear what should go to community and techbase. Our first goal was to define a clear and precise line to discriminate the content of the two other wikis.

Defining this line took us not less than 2 (two!) days. We thought in term of Who is the target of this wiki? and had a lot of discussions about specific and borderline cases. We talked on IRC to get second views and see if our ideas where reasonable. We ended with these presentation texts (see [2]):

Techbase.kde.org is primarily aimed at external developers.
It provides documentation and help for developers building on or extending KDE products in their own projects.

Community.kde.org is the working area for the KDE community.
It provides a place for sharing information within the community, including policies, guidelines and coordination.

I’ll come back to this in a dedicated post in a few time… You already can read some details on this on Alex’s blog [3].

Hard work with moving pages…

When our ideas were clearer, we began to follow our new rules and reorganize the wikis for real. We realized that most of the pages in Techbase were belonging to Community, and that we had thus to work hard on Community as well.

This wouldn’t have been possible without @neverendingo and @nicolas17 who gave us temporary more rights on Community and Techbase, helped us to massively move pages and replace them by links to the new position and so on…

We are not completely done, but please let us know if you don’t find something… We might have forgotten some links.. You can already go on the wiki to see how it is slowly changing (for the best!).

I’ll be back with more info later!

Cheers and have fun!

What we did this week wouldn’t have been possible without the support of KDE e.V. Consider supporting it!
Via Paypal for one-time donations
Become an ongoing supporter and official supporting member

Links

[1] https://techbase.kde.org
[2] https://wiki.kde.org
[3] https://randomguy3.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/wiki-reorganisation/

Sprint at CERN, hey you wanna help?

This is rather a short post…

The sprint at CERN for WikiToLearn, the VDG and Plasma team and to reorganize Techbase is beginning on Monday. As I already said in previous posts about reorganizing Techbase: having clean and organized wiki is really beneficial for the community. It will be easier to find the information, and thus the community will be more efficient.

People asked on the mailing list if they could remotely help… I just want to say: Of course! To work on the Techbase, you can join us on #kde-www and #kde-devel (on freenode) and see what’s still to do, and what the plan is.

I cannot already say how we are going to be organized but anyway, just ask on the channels (you can ping me @ochurlaud as well).

As I said, a short post: I’m already done.

Next week, ping us on #kde-www, and hack with us!

Cheers, and have fun!!
Olivier

Sprint at CERN: it’s coming….

The sprint at CERN is already almost there.

I was quite afraid that our part (reorganizing the Techbase wiki) would not be doable because of the problem KDE had on all the wikis. Because of a severe spam attack [1], all edition rights were suspended until a better authentication was implemented.

It is now done! (kudos @neverendingo, @bcooksley, @Nikerabbit and all people who contributed to that)

What are we going to do there?

As already written in my previous post, this sprint is a WikiToLearn [2] sprint. Other projects, such as Plasma and the VDG Team were kindly invited to join. I’ll be part of the team working on tidying up the Techbase wiki [3].

This includes moving the KDE4-related documentation to an archive namespace, (re?)moving old drafts and duplicate documentation, checking that everything we leave in the main namespace is up-to-date. And certainly more.

What already began… What can you already do?

I’ve seen that @jucato already began to port some tutorials from KDE to KF5. He added some tasks that I regrouped here [4]. It’s not comprehensive but still a good start.

Begin to have ideas, create tasks in the project techbase on our Phabricator, and do whatever usefull I haven’t thought of!

Keep in mind…

KDE ev. is supporting this sprint: I know it is worth it and that this money is well spent… Let’s rock this!

Cheers and have fun!

Links

[1] http://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=137466627807667&w=2
[2] http://wikitolearn.org/
[3] https://techbase.kde.org
[4] https://phabricator.kde.org/T1399

KDE: Sprint to reorganize the wikis (at CERN)

Hey there!

You might have heard of my proposition to reorganize the wikis. I posted it on kde-devel, kde-www and kde-community.

What’s the point?

You might have seen that Techbase [1] is a mess[citation needed]. It’s quite hard to know if an article deals with KDE4 or KF5 as plenty of the pages are drafts for another draft that is almost done… but almost.

What’s the plan?

So basically, our part in the sprint would be to take Techbase, read most of the documentation, and order/tidy up. This would entail putting all the KDE4-related pages in a new namespace, the drafts and unneeded pages in an other (to review before being removed),…

It’s also about planning for the future: do we accept to do a sprint for this every N years? Or do we introduce a sort of validating process for what is going to be in the wiki? And all the ideas that can come to you as well.

And that’s not all! We are kindly invited for this sprint by the teams of WikiToLearn, Plasma and KDEEdu, so we’ll meet all these humans who were hidden under names and pseudos. And that’s nice! (Yes, it will be my first Sprint, and also the first time I meet KDE developers for real…).

Where and when?

Here comes the best part: the Sprint will take place at CERN. I don’t know if we’ll get to visit (but I hope so), but already having been there, I can say being in the place is already quite exciting!
So let’s meet on March 7th in Geneva!

How do I join?

Here is the link where you need to register if you want to join physically: [2]. Please choose Wiki/Documentation as the team you are joining.

Here are the directions to get to CERN: [3].

Is it possible to give a hand remotely?

Of course it’s possible. I don’t know how it is going to be organized to deal with the different timezone but any kind of help is welcomed, always!

And now?

I’ll drop a link on the mailing-lists so that we prepare the Sprint some time ahead… But I think that there is no hurry 🙂

See you there and in the mean time:
Cheers and have fun!

Links

[1] Techbase: https://techbase.kde.org/
[2] Register here: https://sprints.kde.org/sprint/291
[3] Get to CERN: http://home.cern/directions