KDE wikis want you

There were quite a few good comments on my last blog entry on how to get more people wikiing for KDE. Thank-you to everyone spent time thinking about it and providing feedback.

What I personally got out of your comments is that we need to:

• make sure potential writers know about Userbase and Techbase and how important they are


• make it clear on Userbase and Techbase that they are open to contribution by all involved, not just "the blessed few" from some mythical core KDE writing community


• provide easy-to-find lists of pages that need writing, pages that need improving and editing


• provide reviewers / writing mentors, and to make those people visible to potential authors

Some expressed that they didn't know if the wikis were used that much. Techbase is the older of the two wikis and is approximately as old as KDE 4 is. If we look at it we may find some interesting numbers, such as that there over 4,000 registered users who have made nearly 53,000 edits to the nearly 19,000 pages. The Tutorials page has been viewed nearly a quarter of a million times, with more people being sent directly to tutorials through links on the web. Total number of views on Techbase? Getting close to 19 million. Sounds useful to me. Once Userbase gains traction and we get content on there, given our user-to-developer ratio, it should put Techbase's numbers to shame. :) We really need to do a better job of raising awareness of the existence of Techbase and the fairly new Userbase as well as how critical they are to our shared success.

As for "todo lists", it should be doable with a few well maintained "open tasks, available mentors" pages as well as liberal and consistent use of templates such as {{improve|reason}}.

First, though, I'd like to run a small experiment inspired by the last two points in the list: Pointers to two pages, one on Userbase and one on Techbase, that need content can be found below. The experiment is this: does it help people get started writing? How / why?

Here are the two pages:

1. Document how to use the panels in Plasma Desktop here.
   
   There is already a start on it, but it's fairly skeletal and doesn't cover things such as moving widgets in a panel or creating new panels. What it does cover, it does so without much detail, for instance "Add Widgets" is documented as "Allows widgets to be added to the panel." Your task is to take that content as a starting point and flesh it out with more content and structure on the the new Plasma Panels page.


2. Document the new Javascript Plasma DataEngine API here.
   
   Over the last few days I've been working on Javascript DataEngines and it is rapidly reaching feature parity with what is possible in C++. It needs, however, to be documented in much same way as the Plassoid Javascript API. Thankfully the DataEngine API is much, much smaller than the Plasmoid API, and some sections can even be copy and pasted directly over from the Plasmoid API page! To work on this, you will want to have the KDE Examples module which now has two Javascript DataEngine examples in it (svn co svn://anon@svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdeexamples) as well as kdebase/runtime/ checked out from svn trunk (svn co svn://anon@svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime) so you can look in the source code if needed (in plasma/scriptengines/javascript/dataengine/).

I'll be watching both pages, as well as their Discussion pages, so you can start editing right away if you'd like. You can also email me (aseigo at kde dot org) or find me in #plasma on irc.freenode.net to discuss content while or before you start writing. The wording doesn't have to be perfect and we proof readers will look over it when all is said and done, so don't worry about that.

By adding content for either of the two tasks above, you will be helping untold numbers of users and developers looking for answers. You will also be making a significant and valued contribution to KDE, joining our team of software developers, graphic artists, bug wranglers and translators in helping make Plasma rock!