A Call to Arms
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- Are the screenshots horribly out of date?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.
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Something that might help with areas of the wiki going stale would be the tagging of entries (be they text, pictures etc etc) with significant events. When the events occur, the wiki would then list all the items that need review. For example, if screen shots could be tagged with a ‘new SC release’ trigger, then each time an SC is released, a list of screen shots that need updating could be generated. Another example might be articles linked to a ‘NVidia releases new drivers’ event, where articles on things like how to get compositing working, plasma performance etc etc could be listed as needing to be updated.
Not sure if the wiki structure supports this sort of behaviour, but it would be cool 🙂
@Nathan: It’s relatively easy to tag whole pages, using Hidden Categories, but tagging single elements on a page does not seem possible, I think. I like your idea (screenshots updates), but at the moment can’t think how it could be implemented. Tagging for external releases like driver changes could indeed be done, but maintenance is the problem. It would need someone who actually uses the drivers to commit to monitoring and updating relevant pages. Still, it’s worth thinking about, and maybe someone will come on #kde-www and volunteer to help, if we set such pages up.