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.

Hi – I’m Anne,a.k.a. annew.  I live in Yorkshire, England, in the Pennine hills, which are very beautiful when the sun shines – which is not often enough!  I spend all my spare time, and a lot that isn’t spare, working with KDE.  I’ve been giving and receiving help on mailing lists since 2002, and now am devoting most of my time to helping UserBase get off the ground.

So where has UserBase got to?  It’s hard to believe that it is only 6 days since “UserBase goes Live!” was posted.  We now have 127 pages of content, and the number grows daily.  We have 40 registered contributors – not bad for 1 week, but we need lots more.  It is possible to edit without logging in, but there is one big disadvantage.  We can’t leave messages for you.  While Talk:UserName pages are not private and protected, they are less likely to be read by others than the Discussion pages attached to content pages.  No-one is forcing you to create a login, but it does aid communication.

What will make it more useful for users?  At the moment the first thing that users will notice is that they can get a very quick overview of what applications KDE offers.  It may well be that we’ve missed some of the lesser known ones – now’s the time to add them and get them better known.

Application pages generally consist of an overview of the features, with a screenshot or two, and links to the project’s home page.  All very good, as a starter, but not good enough.  What we really need is a FAQs, Hints and Tips section for every one of those pages.  If every KDE user added just one tip or one helpful screenshot, can you imagine what a resource that would make?

So is UserBase only to be a help to users?  I hope not.  UserBase is the perfect place to keep in touch with your project’s users.  Set a Watch on the pages that you are concerned with.  Use the Discussion pages attached to them to make suggestions.  If users post a question on a Discussion page, you can either answer it there or add it to the FAQ section for the project.

Developers – we don’t want to add any burden, so tell us how we can help you.  Users, tell us what you need and can’t easily find. There have been 52,763 page views so far – let’s make UserBase really work for everyone.