Today is the final day of our course, and it is time to assess our progress. Three of our students completed at least one page, while others have pages in various stages of preparation. The results are pleasing - good, well-laid-out pages, with plenty of useful information. I hope you have all enjoyed the course, and will continue to work with UserBase. I am, of course, always open to requests for help. Now some questions for you:

Was the material in PageLayout and Toolbox clear and easy to understand?
If any of it wasn't, please describe the problem.
Did answers to your queries arrive in reasonable time, so that you were not held up?
Did you find it useful to read answers to the questions that others asked?
Did writing a page give you a deeper understanding of the application?
Are you likely to carry on, writing other pages?
Would you find it helpful to keep the forum topic (Userbase Editing course 1) open for your questions? Would you prefer some other place?
Is the Forum a good place for such a course? Are there any problems?
What would you like to see changed for future courses?

Was the material in PageLayout and Toolbox clear and easy to understand?
If any of it wasn't, please describe the problem.


Watching others work questions, I noticed that several items that were interesting to include were not on the Toolbox page.

• I think a link to the galleries and a description of how to use them would be good.
• How to deal with the table of contents (notoc) that was explained during discussion
• A recommendation/standard way to indicate a page is being developed (perhaps as part of the Klassroom process - but also a general note to indicate who is currently trying to develop a page - perhaps indicating a willingness to get recommendations and questions needing specific answers from visitors - using the talk page. (Link back to user page?)

Did answers to your queries arrive in reasonable time, so that you were not held up?
Absolutely. Thanks, annew.

Did you find it useful to read answers to the questions that others asked?
There was a significant benefit since many of the same issues were true for each project, and other students' approaches sparked good ideas for me.

Did writing a page give you a deeper understanding of the application?
Teaching something to somebody else is the fourth step of learning something for me.

• Read once
• hear lecture/take notes/ask questions
• Read again/review
• Teach somebody else

Are you likely to carry on, writing other pages?
Yes. It would also be helpful if a part of the process in the UserBase community included review of pages written (noting questions needing answers, etc.) with a central location (beyond the talk pages for each program) that made requests for pages or proposals of new topics to be written. Currently, it seems to be that the way to find a project is to go through the list of applications, group by group, looking for red program names instead of blue. What is the process for adding new programs to the lists?

Would you find it helpful to keep the forum topic (Userbase Editing course 1) open for your questions? Would you prefer some other place?
The current forum focuses on one "class" group. For now, that's a good place, but when there have been several classes, it might be better to have a centralized forum for all "students" in a particular topical class not just a bunch of similar forums.

Is the Forum a good place for such a course? Are there any problems?
Because the forum is phpbb, its formatting isn't the same as the UserBase in mediawiki and that needs to be in a student's mind (I was puzzling about it while writing here). Consistency of behavior between discussion forum and UserBase pages is potentially confusing.

Interesting phpbb note: Once one starts using a color (like blue, here, one cannot change to red without stopping the blue: no simple color nesting.

What would you like to see changed for future courses?
Introduction to use of IRC? While the course is designed to be mainly asynchronous, which is a great idea, an IRC session, as a student group with our mentor, might help those who are not familiar with IRC/Konversation, for example. Timing might be tough as would troubleshooting problems. Listings of the relevant IRC channels that would be appropriate to use while working on UserBase pages, though would be good.

Update: never mind about the IRC list...found in the help section of UserBase. I guess there is nothing like doing a full reading before typing suggestions. One tends to miss what others have already thought of!

What is the correct etiquette for working on pages that have been done before? Talk page? Plunge in to edit? How territorial do people feel about pages they have worked hard to get into the UserBase?

Tutorials seem to be a separate page category from program writeups. Are they appropriate for us to consider as subsequent projects in addition to application pages?

@algotruneman: (not quoting, due to length )

I'm a bit worried about making the Toolbox page too long, and thus daunting, but I'll think about those suggestions. Maybe a 'More Tools' page, for needs that are not the very first step, might be one way around the problem.

Currently being edited/under construction - perhaps the answer is a template rather like the Info template that you see on several pages. That does allow you to add information such as the site on which development is taking place - your user page, or some unlinked page. I'll give that some thought.

Finding pages to work on - currently, you either search for a topic of your interest, to see what's there and whether it needs improving, or you browse, as you say, looking for red-links. There's no problem at all about adding a program to the relevant Application page listing, from where you would develop the page. It's often easiest to work out where it should go, then copy and paste the item directly before it, and edit it to display the correct icon and text.

It would be quite feasible to have a wish-list somewhere, but this is a KDE site, on a KDE server, and should focus on KDE software or interaction of other software with KDE software (such as integrating FireFox). I wouldn't want to have to spend too much time explaining that a particular application isn't appropriate. This needs some thought.

Continuing using the forum topic - our topic was Userbase Editing Course 1 - the next one will be Course 2, and will have its own area for work, so the Course 1 topic remains for the use of the current batch of students. I accept the point that it doesn't display your code in mediawiki terms. The answer to that is probably to put the code in question onto talk pages and link them from the forum.

IRC - for those familiar with it, IRC can be used to ask questions, as long as the person is willing to feed the information back into the forum topic. For those less familiar, we are considering how we can best do this. Certainly we could write a UserBase page about it. If we are to have our Wish page, let's have that on the list.

Etiqette for working on existing pages - if you are making a simple change, adjusting formatting or adding information, just do it. That's the nature of wiki pages. If something is actually wrong, and therefore has to be considerably changed, I would try to find the author of the existing text and leave a message on his User page as to what I had done, and why. It's just a matter of mutual respect, really.

Tutorials, as a section, is merely intended for where a more detailed page or set of pages is needed than would sensibly be added to an application. I think, too, that things like Getting Started with IRC would belong there. Tutorials should be linked from any application pages where they are relevant, which may sometimes be more than one application. They are open for you to write or edit, the same as any other. The selection I first mentioned were chosen because they could be done reasonably simply, if necessary. As it turned out, the results were more detailed than I expected, which is very pleasing. If you have an idea for a topic and feel unsure where to put it, ask and I'll be glad to help.

Was the material in PageLayout and Toolbox clear and easy to understand?

Pagelayout was easy understandable, i had little issues with toolbox, but with a little help, i managed to find my way.

If any of it wasn't, please describe the problem.

Toolbox is suitable for the most cases, but in some rare situations, i was looking for at least a link where to find detailed information of the wiki-syntax. Maybe a link to the mediawiki site (as you have pointed me to, annew) would be helpful.

Did answers to your queries arrive in reasonable time, so that you were not held up?

Well, yes. I took the fastest way and asked via irc.

Did you find it useful to read answers to the questions that others asked?

Of course, it is a very basic element in learning how to write a good wiki article. To see where others are struggling can help one to avoid those hurdles.

Did writing a page give you a deeper understanding of the application?

Hmmm, as KUser isn't that hard to understand, the learningcurve wasn't that steep. But i found some useful things in there, yes.

Are you likely to carry on, writing other pages?

I've already began the work on another one. So, yes.

Would you find it helpful to keep the forum topic (Userbase Editing course 1) open for your questions? Would you prefer some other place?

I think it would be more helpful, if there was a separate part in the forum, where everybody can ask questions, or discuss articles in/from userbase.

Is the Forum a good place for such a course? Are there any problems?

I think this forum is the best place for such kind of courses. It is a central place to go with any kind of KDE-related questions.

What would you like to see changed for future courses?

As algotruneman already mentioned, it could be a good thing, to involve the irc-channel more in the/a course. It is a place where one can find immediate help and talk about issues in a more "fluid" way, without waiting for an answer in the forum (i don't want to say, that help isn't fast here, i just like the more "personal touch" in irc ).

So, a big thanks to everyone (and especially to annew) for giving me/us the chance and help to contribute to the best desktop environment ever.

Good night,
Steven

Thanks, both of you, for your comments. We have now had time to consider them, and have made plans accordingly. Please keep an eye on the Klassroom area viewforum.php?f=71 where we will create a topic for further questions regarding UserBase editing.

We will put copies of your reference files - PageLayout and Toolbox - together with another document with additional help, such as using the gallery and manipulating the ToC, into the Klassroom area as well.

I will create two templates - one for page under construction and one for 'editing in progress' and include instructions for using them in the new document.

We will discuss requirements to run an Introduction to IRC course - probably only an hour or so long - repeated at intervals, and to document on UserBase how to set it up and use IRC.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the course. I look forward to seeing more of your contributions.