Well, here we are on the fourth release of KDE 4.x, and I noticed something that is flat out embarrassing.

- Go to your menu and click on "help"
- Select "KDE User's manual"

You'll get an attractive document called the "KDE User Guide" which is an excellent introduction to.... KDE 3.

It is painful imagining a new KDE user reading through this guide scratching his/her head wondering why "kicker" doesn't behave as the manual describes, or why there is no chapter on Dolphin or Plasma, why none of the console commands given work, or why none of the screenshots look familiar.

A bug was filed on this almost a year ago: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177969

So my questions are:
- Is it just my distro (Kubuntu) or are others shipping this as well?
- Does anyone know if there is an effort under way to update this document?
- If so, who do I contact about getting involved and helping out?
- If nothing else, why is KDE still shipping with an obsolete and misleading help document? Wouldn't it be better just to leave it out?

I installed the docs just to check it out, and indeed, it's KDE3 stuff (using KDEMod here). Unfortunately I can't answer your other questions.

I remember a thread on the kde-doc-english@kde.org mailinglist about exactly that.
And indeed it is rather outdated. Unfortunately the work on it went down again, after someone stepped up.

But if you like to give it a shot, write to the above mailinglist and tell them about your plans.

In my opinion, I think we should forget the user guide in Help and just have it point to the wiki/documentation in kde.org. The members of this community (especially members like me who don't code) could work to make sure the wiki/documentation is of high quality. To me this could be a good long-term way of handling the Help. Besides, a vast majority of users would have internet access. So why not just have the user guide and all online?

I agree that it is worth-while to direct users to the online wiki and documentation, but we have to make sure and cater to the different versions of KDE that are being used as there are some users who are (still) using KDE 4.1, and as KDE releases more and more high-quality versions (4.4, 4.5, etc.) we will likely see a greater spread of the versions that people are using.
With the differences between each major release, we might as well have separate documentation for each release, in which case we might as well distribute the documentation for each release with that release.

airdrik wrote:I agree that it is worth-while to direct users to the online wiki and documentation, but we have to make sure and cater to the different versions of KDE that are being used as there are some users who are (still) using KDE 4.1, and as KDE releases more and more high-quality versions (4.4, 4.5, etc.) we will likely see a greater spread of the versions that people are using.
With the differences between each major release, we might as well have separate documentation for each release, in which case we might as well distribute the documentation for each release with that release.

I see...I was just trying to think of an efficient way to go about this. The less work the better, so that way we can spend time on other things (not to take away from quality though). Perhaps distribute a 'freeze' of the online wiki per each version and supply a link to the full online wiki along with it? That way two seperate docs do not have to be written, as that would be nearly twice the work

Make sure you check out userbase.kde.org which is a wiki for end user documentation

Cheers,
_