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Some (or most?) of the KDE user documentation shipped with KDE 4 is out of date. Look at http://docs.kde.org/
Many users are willing to write Documentation for the apps they use, but don't want to fiddle with docbook or tools like that.
Therefore the KDE documentation should be moved to a wiki - so users can get involved in writing/translating documentation easier and faster.

http://userbase.kde.org
http://techbase.kde.org
http://usekde.com

Yes, there are user wikis, but I mean the official application documentation (manuals), shipped with every KDE release.
The juK manual, for example is from 2004!

I heard the doc team rejected the idea of putting all docus on a wiki.
Though it is still possible as user to enter above wikis and put in every info you want.

This reminds me, i should poke some mentor to put up a doku writing kourse... ;-P

Do you know why they rejected the idea?

The current documentation is not very useful - what's the point to click on "Help" if you get a manual that's 4 years old?

If they don't want a wiki, they shoul provide another easy way for users to contribute.

You can just subscribe to the kde-doc-english mailing list (https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-doc-english) and say that you want to contribute. You don't even need to know svn or docbook, just sending even plain text files with documentation updates should be more than enough.

The KOffice guys came to the same conclusion; the current system doesn't work and a wiki might help. You can find KWords manual on userbase already
Go update it now!

Wiki is the way to go now. I don't believe docbooks and offline-only manuals, however simple it is to contribute to them, is going much further. Look at gentoo's wiki, it's great. When I used gentoo, I always found what I needed on there.

Wiki is great, i think KDE should implement that faster...

I think the ideal would be a bit of both. If there was an online wiki that users could edit it would make for easy contributions and finding the most up to date stuff easy.

BUT

I think there should be a tool that would then take that wiki and convert it to the usual KDE help files to included into the next KDE release.

That way the Help files would be both up to date and availble online and at a known state and in standard help file format in KDE.

It's the tools to conver from wiki to KDE help files that is the hard bit :undecided:

Rms-Mit wrote:I think there should be a tool that would then take that wiki and convert it to the usual KDE help files to included into the next KDE release.

Ideally, every release, someone(s) would sanitize the wiki covert them to docbooks and ship them.

pembo13 wrote:

Rms-Mit wrote:I think there should be a tool that would then take that wiki and convert it to the usual KDE help files to included into the next KDE release.

Ideally, every release, someone(s) would sanitize the wiki covert them to docbooks and ship them.

... and say goobye to translations, right!

pinotree wrote:... and say goobye to translations, right!

Good point. The translation team will have to give their input here, though there's no reason why a wiki can't support multiple languages.

help-with-the-kwor ... 39933.html
Time to show that you, the users, are willing to contribute to something like this.

ArchLinux and Gentoo have their documentation in wiki and which is having great contributions...