AnneW's world

subtitle: Is UserBase selling you short?

If you follow my blogs you’ll know that one of my preoccupations in UserBase is with navigation.  More than once I’ve seen a mailing list message that UserBase contains no information about a particular problem, whereon I’ve had to reply with a link to the information.  The search facility built in to the wiki is not good, and we have plans to do something about that, but that alone isn’t enough.

When I first saw Dolphin I fell in love with Breadcrumb Navigation, and I have wanted something like that for UserBase ever since.  I began manually adding breadcrumbs, but stopped when it was pointed out that scalability was a big problem.  We now have over 1000 pages.  It just isn’t a solution on that scale.  Now we are looking at possible mediawiki extensions to deal with the problem.  There are several, and at the moment we have not made the decision as to which best suits our purpose.  However, most of them do rely on pages being allocated to Categories, so for the last week I have concentrated on getting those categories working.  I’m mopping up the last few English pages now, and when I’ve discussed with our active translators I’ll help them get the translated pages categorized as well.  That’s the good news part.

While I’ve been doing this, I’ve had an enormous shock.  I found pages that I had forgotten existed.  Worse, everyone else seems to have forgotten them too.   Once we get our navigation improved all those are going to be so much more visible – and you will not be happy with the result.  I really need your help.  I need you to look for the page for your application, then also use the Category link at the bottom of the page to check for related pages.  I need you to check for these things –

• Are the screenshots horribly out of date?
• Is a revision, either of the application or required SC version, mentioned and is it up to date?
• Are there links to related UserBase pages that are no longer relevant?
• If there are links to external project pages, are those links still correct?

Then there are at least two applications that have compile instructions on UserBase.  From the start we agreed that those are not for the average user.  After consulting the developer mailing list it was agreed that the UserBase page should carry a link to a page under http://techbase.kde.org/Projects, and the compile instructions moved there.

We have so many plans to improve UserBase over the coming months.  It would be a pity if that improvement caused embarrassment by exposing such problems, so please take a good look at your pages.  You are always welcome to contact me by email, or to catch me on #kde-www.

The third and final part of my wanderings today concerns the development of our wikis.  I told you last time that the forum team have set up a sandbox wiki for us, and a good deal of work has come out of that during that past two weeks. A special thanks is due to neverendingo, who has done so much work for us.

When we started this I had not realised that the reason our wikis are consistent in looks is because they share the same skin.  Even when I first heard that, I didn’t entirely realise the consequences of this.  Basically, apart from content itself, anything that is done to one of the wikis will also affect the others.  The downside of this is that we really should have agreement among all the wiki maintainers before things get changed, and that really means that we need to be exchanging views far more often.  #kde-www is the easiest place for this to happen.  The upside,though, is huge.  As long as we can get those communication channels working, it means that any and every issue we can identify and fix on our sandbox can be used to the benefit of all our wikis, giving noticeable improvements to them all for minimal effort.

One issue that we have looked at concerns the Recent Changes RSS feed, which has been broken since our Mediawiki installation was upgraded to 1.14.0.  I had hoped that upgrading to 1.15 would fix it – but it doesn’t.  We have 1.16alpha installed on our sandbox – the version that is due to be release in the next few weeks (and it is remarkably stable, as far as our limited use can tell) – but that doesn’t fix it either.  From reading posts in the archives of the Mediawiki mailing list it seems that the decision-makes at Mediawiki don’t think it’s worth putting time and effort into fixing RSS when Atom feeds are totally reliable, and, they say, more powerful.  I have been watching voth RSS and Atom feeds for both UserBase and Userbase-testing for a while now, and I have to say that the Atom feeds are great.  That begs the question, though, of whether RSS feeds should be offered on our wiki pages.  Because they are so well known, not to offer them might seem very strange.  However, offering something that is known to be really badly broken is embarrassing.

The other issue that has been taking our time is that of developing systems to help with translations.  We are getting a great deal of help from the two developers of the translation extension, which naturally feeds back to improve the extension for everyone else.

As we have talked to translators it has become clear that we are not going to get a one-size-fits-all solution, so we are looking at a two-pronged attack.  The main, and intended, usage of the extension is to do it on-line.  The source is marked up as translatable, and from then on changes are tracked so that the translators can see what needs updating.  It’s a new way of working, so there is a small learning curve, and there are still a few wrinkles to iron out, but it’s looking very promising indeed.

For those who prefer to work with familiar tools, the extension does allow export and import of .po files.  Again, there are wrinkles, but the main system is actually working now.  This system is also one that would be useful for creating docbook files.  There is a downside, though, to using this method for translations.  What if we have more than one translator for a language, and one starts to work on it on-line but the other has downloaded it for off-line translating?

Apart from the RSS issue, I don’t think we’ve found anything so far that can’t be fixed, one way or another.  If you have any involvement with our wiki sites, please do join us on #kde-www whenever you can, to be part of the development.  I have high hopes that we can make a huge contribution to the wikis.

Reading my newest Linux Format I was delighted to hear that there is a project in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, that uses donated/recycled computers.  I live in West Yorkshire, but in the south-west corner, so Sheffield is a mere 40 minutes drive away.  Naturally I followed this up – an opportunity too good to miss.  If you live in the mid- to north of England, take a look at http://www.access-space.org/?c=recycling

I was curious to know more about the activities of Access Space – and amazed and delighted at what I saw there.  The most surprising thing was http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk/ !  The Html Patchwork, no less.  Every cell of the patchwork represents the hexadecimal colours, and every contributor gets web space to tell about their work and activities.  The resulting patchwork was displayed in Sweden this summer, but if you live in or near San Francisco you can see it during October to next January, at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art.

Then there’s LOSS – The Linux Open Source Sound project.  Electronica is not my kind of music, but I did sample a few tracks – they appear to all be Creative Commons licensed.  For a smile you really should listen to the Jake Harries -Eh? track.  The CD was recorded in 2006, but I did notice that at least one upload was in 2009, so presumably the project is still active.

Part III – coming shortly – has news about developments related to UserBase in particular and our wikis in general.

Two weeks since I last wrote, and so much has happened that this feels a bit like a scatter-gun approach, to tell about everything.  Anyway, let’s start by looking at UserBase’s current statistics.

We now have 935 pages of content (how soon can we make it 1000?), disregarding the discussion pages, which have attracted 1,806,159 views!  A tremendous number.  Our registered member number has gone up too, to 819.  Still only a small proportion of members actively contribute, but that is noticeably more than it was a few months ago.

These are the top-10 contribution statistics for the past seven days (yes, eleven again):

Once more our translators account for a large number of edits, but it’s good to see some new names among the content providers as well, and the list can’t include the names of people who send content to me and ask me to add it.

When I look at the Popular Pages statistics, I am somewhat surprised at what I find, though.

Most viewed pages:

The kde-pim applications clearly are heavy attractors.  Although I expected that to some extent, I expected to see more emphasis on some of the other categories, such as Internet, or Multimedia.