We have a brand new face – introducing – ta-da! – Chihuahua on UserBase!
Increasingly, UserBase pages are beginning to use Special:myLanguage in links, so what is special about that? Well, it depends whether you are a reader or a translator.
For readers, it will mean that increasingly they will be taken to pages in their own language. The way it works is that it is aware of the language that you set in your preferences as your root language – that is myLanguage. If you click on a link it checks to see if there is a page available in that language, and if there is, that page is displayed. If no page exists, the English one is displayed instead. Of course, it only works for those pages that are within our new translation system, so we do need help to enable more of those pages, whether by fresh translations or by copy-and-paste from the old ones.
What’s advantage to translators? Simply that they no longer have to check for the existence of translated pages before deciding how to define the link. Using Special:myLanguage means that the moment a suitably translated page is available, it will be displayed from the link. That’s a time-saver.
It will take time to get all pages to take advantage of this, but it’s certainly a job worth doing, and one that you can help with in the odd hours when you need a change from your usual work.
You won’t be surprised to hear that at Akademy I spent a good deal of time talking to people about UserBase, how we can improve it, and how it can help with documentation problems. Several exciting improvements are expected in the next few weeks, but I’m leaving that as a teaser for now. First I want to talk about just one of the ideas that was floated, as we sat watching people stir the barbeque.
If so, UserBase needs you. What we need is not so much geek as bulldog determination. For our wikis to be really useful in the long run they need to keep to guidelines that will enable them to be used with translation tools – both for localization and for translation to docbook. Working with our translators we have produced a short guide to which all pages should, in time, adhere. Since we have so many pages I propose that we tackle small groups at a time, editing them thoroughly, so that they can be marked for translation. You will find the first four groups on the Translation Workflow page.
If you have a little time to spare while waiting for your application to build, we could really use it – we are looking for long-term benefit.
By the way –
Just a reminder – if you are going to trans late in UserBase you need to
After almost a year of planning we now have the TranslateWiki facility on UserBase! What difference does that make? A lot! For a start, it means a completely new way of working, if you’ve been one of our faithful on-line translators. It takes a little getting used to, but it has big advantages for the future, and will, in the long run, save you a lot of work. To explain how, I need to tell you something about its capabilities first.
Some two years ago Uga wrote some wonderful blogs explaining techniques for quality photo editing (Uga’s Blog). His host didn’t store the actual photos, and in an unfortunate accident the ones belonging to some of the blogs were lost. I’d dearly like to have all of these on UserBase. The remaining blog, 1-1: Levels adjust is referenced on UserBase. There were also
We had a link to the last one on UserBase – but it appears to be an incomplete address, so I don’t know whether that was lost too.
With the number of keen photographers in KDE there is a distinct possibility that someone saved a copy of those tutorials. If they could be located I’d ask permission to put them (in entirety, not as references) in UserBase.
Such tutorials should not be lost. If you know other material that should also be preserved on UserBase, please let me know.
It’s a while since I wrote about UserBase, but there’s been plenty of activity. Let’s look at some statistics, first. We now have 1,212 content pages and 1,236 uploaded images. There have been 10,889 page edits since UserBase began – and that will already be out of date by the time you read this. We have 1,459 registered users, of which 20 have contributed this week. A year ago that statistic was a mere handful. The total number of views is now 2,764,290! Kontact is the most-viewed page – well ahead of the Welcome page – and Akonadi has passed GPU-Performance! A sign of the times, perhaps.
Top 10 contributors this week
Once again the top three places in the Contributions table go to translators. New contributors since last I wrote are Jzmer, writing about Kimpanel, Afiestas who has undertaken to get the Kbluetooth page sorted out, Aseigo who is writing about Plasmate and Algotruneman – a student on our recent UserBase Editing Klassroom course, who has taken on the difficult twin pages of Krdc and Krfb.
As UserBase has grown, so some of it has become unwieldy, difficult to find for those new to the site, so we have a new initiative to help navigation. Every English page now carries a Category field at the bottom. Clicking on that takes you to a page where you can see the list of all pages in the same category. With a little more work that promises to be very useful. But what if you are a user with little English, or, even worse, poor skills at reading Latin script?
Clearly we have to do the same categorisation for other languages, but they mustn’t be presented with an English category name. At the same time, we need standardised category names, to avoid making still more complications, so, after consultation with involved translators we decided that we must make a table of names and ‘approved’ translations. Hans Chen kindly dented for me, and many people responded quickly,so that we now have 20 out of 31 languages entirely or almost entirely translated in the Category tables. If you command another language, please take a look at http://userbase.kde.org/Translation_Help_Needed and follow the link to your language, to see whether any more help is needed.
This is just the start of our ‘other language’ support. We plan to offer translated page names too, which will also mean that searches in other languages will be more successful. A new tool to make translations easier to manage will be installed shortly, and we’ll put up a page on how to use it. On-line and off-line translations are supported. Currently there are many pages with almost no language support, and some translated pages are over a year out of date – something we need to address. Hopefully this tool will take some of the hassle out of it. If all goes to plan you will see the start of this within the next few weeks.
What else? Well, the mediawiki engine is to be updated, probably to the same version as is used by Wikipedia, and, oh yes! A whole new look, based on our new kde.org website, is planned. Of course our wonderful web team need to draw breath first 🙂
A wiki is supposed to be an easy place for all to contribute to documentation, but when we held an IRC meeting about UserBase, back in October, it was clear that not everyone found the wikis welcoming or comfortable. We’ve started several initiatives to solve, or at least alleviate, some of the problems.
First, we have made sure that ‘Help’ in the navigation panel points to http://userbase.kde.org/Help:Contents – where general guidance is found. Then, right at the bottom of the page is a Category link. Clicking on that takes you to a page that lists other pages that you might find helpful – some to help you quickly find what you need, and others to help you get started contributing. At the moment the English pages are, I believe, fully represented. Currently you will see some translated pages listed there, but work is in hand to improve this, giving languages their own Category links. Watch this space!
So – you’ve found your way around a bit, and know roughly what you want to say, but you’re still finding the whole thing a bit daunting. Well, the first thing is to remember that you are not working in a vacuum. Sign on to #kde-www on irc.freenode.org and there will always be someone around to help. Even better – starting next weekend we have a Klassroom course on contributing to UserBase. Sign on at http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=84864.
The aim is quite simple – to make you familiar and comfortable with the tools of mediawiki editing and the layout of a typical UserBase page. This course is for you if
You will work on a UserBase page, asking questions on a dedicated forum thread. You will see questions asked and answers received by other students. You will do the work at times when it suits you. Help pages have been prepared to give you all the tools you are likely to need. In fact, the aim is to make it as un-threatening as possible.
This week is sign-up time. We look forward to seeing you on http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=84864 or come along to #kde-www to ask questions.
Happy Christmas, everyone. Time enough for work in a few days 🙂
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