AnneW's world

I mentioned in my last blog that #userbase was soon to become #kde-userbase.  Well, all that has changed.  Let me tell you the developments that changed it.

The forum team kindly set up a sandbox mediawiki so that I could explore the possibilities and test extensions.  It wasn’t long before we realised that several things that concerned us regarding UserBase did in fact affect TechBase and Community wikis as well.  That makes a nonsense of keeping our conversations separate.  There may of course be smaller issues that we want to discuss separately, but that’s no big issue.  The only sensible thing to do is to keep our main discussions about the wiki in a place where the other wiki folk can join in if they think it useful.  In view of that we are changing our channel, not to #kde-userbase, but to #kde-www, and it will happen this evening (28th October).  A re-direct will exist for a few weeks, in case people follow the link from the old blog, but I hope that everyone concerned with the wikis will join us there.

Let me start with a few relevant facts about my life.  As some of you will know, I spend 60-70 hours every week helping with mailing lists, forums and userbase.  It is a huge part of my life.  However, in a few weeks’ time I will be 70, and I have a serious heart condition.  I may be here for a few years yet, or I may be gone tomorrow.  And what will be my legacy to KDE?  At the moment it’s a handful (albeit a big handful) of wiki pages.  That’s not what I want my legacy to be.

I have a dream for that, and it’s realisable.  I want to leave a system that will spell an end to ancient documentation.  A system that is easy to use and light on time required to maintain it.  A pipe-dream?  No, I don’t think it is.  Several people have said that drafting documentation on a wiki is much easier than working directly to docbook, but getting the parts to talk to each other really makes it difficult.  I’ve talked to Albert Astals Cid about what would help language translation, and I’ve talked to Burkhard Lück about what the docbook team need, and I do believe we could get a usable system, and without much delay.  Here’s what I propose:

Stage 1 – the system is triggered by changes to userbase pages.  It first addresses language needs.
Question: is it possible to create RSS feeds for certain groups of pages?
Problem:  currently the Recent Changes RSS feed is broken, sending multiple copies of alerts.  That would have to be fixed first.

Stage 2 – A mediawiki extension outputs a .po syntax file for the changed page.  I         understand that http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate would do that.  Reading through the page, it looks as though a set of tools already exist that implement export and import.

Stage 3 – the exported .po file arrives in SVN, where the system follows normal development lines.  It may save translators considerable time if a diff of the last two versions is sent as well.  This information is readily available through the History pages.

Stage 4 – the mediawiki tool poimport.php is used to import the returned .po file into userbase.

Stage 5 – starts the docbook cycle.  The mediawiki extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XML_Bridge creates docbook XML from mediawiki pages.  The proposal page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/DocBook_XML_export explains how it works.  The resulting output could be made available through docs.kde.org, on distribution disks, and on userbase.

If scripting is needed to make these stages flow, Sayak Banerjee, of forum fame, has agreed to write the scripts for us.  Many thanks to Albert, Burkhard and Sayak for working with me on this.

So – where does that leave us?  Well, before extensions can be added they have to be tested.  For me to do that I need Mediawiki setting up locally, and for that I need a LAMP stack.  None of this is familiar to me, and I’d be working alone, without any form of help.  I could do it, but in a reasonable time-frame?  I doubt that.  So what are the options?  I’m assured that the system would be an enormous time-saver for the i18n and docs teams, so what is the best way forward from here?  Is it possible, for instance, that I could have access to a LAMP stack somewhere else, to be used as a sandbox?  I need all the help and ideas I can get.

Another week almost over, so what is happening in UserBase?  Well, the translation effort continues, and we have some new pages this week – Yakuake, Rekonq, Tutorials/TweakingPlasma and Blogilo – as well as a lot of smaller updates.  We now have 805 pages of content, with 1,437,927 views.  As you see, it is growing healthily.

This section of the statistics caught my eye –

Most viewed pages
Kontact    222,467
Welcome to KDE UserBase    183,468

For a long time GPU-Performance topped the list, but now only has 45,401.  I wonder if this means that there are fewer problems with graphics drivers?

The page http://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Internet is almost complete, except for the Networking section, and there I need to ask for help from someone who uses remote desktop.  I need entries for KRDC, Krfb and KVpnc.  I don’t use them myself, and after reading what I could find, didn’t feel competent to write those.

Current User Statistics

We now have 580 registered users, an increase of 80 in 10 days.

And here are the top 10 of the week’s contributors.
Score  Pages    Changes  Username
67        60           71            Annew
40        33           47           Qiii2006
17        15           16            Claus chr
11          8           11            Kolia
11          8           11            Yurchor
09          5           10            Just
06        3          6          ????? (Apologies if the Chinese characters don’t display)
06           3            6            Andrei natanael
06           6            6            Alisha
05           3           4             Gdebure

Half of those are people who were not in the last list I published, which is very encouraging.

Last Monday I invited you to come and talk to me on #userbase, and I’m pleased to say that severl people did.  We had a long conversation, at the end of which we decided that we must record our discussion in a shared document with a view to calling a meeting for anyone interested to discuss possible changes in UserBase.  We have not yet set a date, but it will probably be in a week or so.  I’ll make sure that the date is publicised.

In outline, we discussed the following:

* There is a lack of consistency of approach.  Many pages follow a common form, but several don’t.
* Currently there’s no obvious way of knowing how recently the page was written or edited.  Considering the rate of change in KDE 4, this is significant.
* A question was asked about the usefulness of a rating system, and its feasibility
* A number of applications were identified that currently have no entry
* Some new applications are strictly Qt, rather than KDE.  How should we deal with that?
* Some sort of visual tour, possibly video, was proposed as an introduction to KDE
* There is still no working solution to the problems that require access to the servers
* UserBase still lacks visibility.  It rarely gets picked up, for instance, in a google search, even though we may have an authoratative answer to a problem, while dubious mailing list answers are found.  Some suggestions for improving visibility were proposed.

I consider that some very useful exchanges of opinion and ideas were made, and I hope you’ll join us to discuss these and any other comments you have.  At the moment we are still using #userbase, but any day now we will be on #kde-userbase.  See you there!

Many people know me through my work with UserBase , where I’m a (the?) major contributor.  I’ve seen myself described as the UserBase maintainer. That’s in no way an official title but today that’s the hat I’m wearing.

UserBase has the potential to be a truly awesome resource, and if you look at some of the statistics it’s getting there.  782 content pages.  539 registered users.  Total views 1,387,442.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  But what about this statistic? – Users who have performed an action in the last 7 days 14! And when you look at the Special:ContributionScores you see that, taking out the excellent work being done by translators (Claus_chr, Yurchor, Qiii2006 and Alisha in particular) you can only conclude that there’s simply not much new content being added.  That’s a terrible shame, considering the cumulative knowledge of 539 registered users.

I’ve been worrying about this for some time, so when I saw a link to http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/ and found the heading “Know Your Team” I began to wonder just who is ‘my team’.  In truth, I know very little about most of the 539 people who have registered, so now it’s time to find out.  Why did you register?  What are your hopes, your expectations?  How can I help you become more involved?

I’ve talked to a few people when they identify a problem with which they would like help, but waiting for that to start a conversation just isn’t enough, so I’ve registered a new channel, #userbase, on Freenode.  I’ll be around most days, so I hope you’ll join me there.  Tell me about the applications you like to use.  Tell me your favourite features.  Tell me what you wanted to know and couldn’t find information about.  Tell me how we can make UserBase into a truly awesome beast.