Hi, I have already posted this to the kde-devel list and on my blog here: http://kde.blogsite.org/?q=node/56 kde-devel comments concluded in something like: it is good idea to use a wiki but the wiki markup needs to be extended to get the same semantics like docbook has. There is also the docbookwiki project which natively supports docbook, but is not sure to be maintained and featured enough for this project. MediaWiki would need some plugins to add the necessary markup for docbook like semantics. Unfortunately I have other stuff to do, some plasmoids and smaller bugs in the pipe and cannot help myself.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have had an idea way back about improved documentation for KDE which I'd like to share since Harald has pointed out the miserable state of documentation in KDE. I know that ideas are only worth one cent or so compared to the implementation, but still I think it would be really helpful: My idea is to use an english Wiki for documenation. This might not be new, but what I mean is to actually integrate the internal help with an online Wiki. That way users can and would write the documenation themselves. This would have two advantages: a) the documentation would be most likely better than what it is now (this is not hard to achieve...) and b) it is a much easier way to start to contribute to KDE than specific translation or bug hunting stuff. Just link from the doc page to the online Wiki for updodate docs and there propose to fix it if it is outdated, wrong or missing. Then pull the Wiki content before string freeze from the database, add screenshot media as uploaded by users and convert it to the docbook. Next step is that the maintainer reads this article *one* time and checks for mistakes or shortcomings as well as docbook fixes. And then move it to the translation team. Guessing the interest of most developers and their personal fun factor it is very unlikely that the documenation will be done sanely, completely and reliably ever, users would be much more reliable because they are plenty and they use app documentation (at least a view of them) and they know what information they missed. The advantage over a drop of the whole doc stuff inside KDE is that you have clear maintained versions shipping with each KDE version and there *are* still offline users around... + you don't get a versions mixup: Many distros will ship specific KDE versions for years and it might quite differ for lets say 3 years = 6 KDE versions. Of course you could do online versioning only as well, but serious reviewed offline documentation is really more professional. I guess that it is a must have for the default de of the major distros, e.g. mandriva. Cheers, duns P.S.: Originally I've although thought to link to a Wiki page from each KMessageBox automatically, so users can share experience with certain errors or infoboxes they don't know how to deal with and will make it more transparent where the error could be caught better. Of course this is related to bug reports as well.
