AnneW's world

A quick note to tell of a small but important change.  We have occasionally met some administrative difficulties on our wikis.  Nothing out of the way, if only we had been able to contact the contributors.  However, the problems arose because the contributor was not logged in.  We have no way of talking to him/her.  In view of this the deicision has been taken to require login before any edit can be done.  On UserBase alone we now have 1074 registered users, so clearly registering is an acceptable process, and it will certainly make life much easier for our various maintainers.  The change will affect each of our wikis, starting over the next few days.

I’ve quite a bit to report on progress and planned changes, so more about that in a day or two.

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.

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.

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.

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.