Monday, January 28, 2008

Growing articles on TechBase

Right now TechBase has content in 19 languages. Sometimes articles grow bigger over time. How to build KDE4 is the prefect example. Here is a list of pages about building KDE4 (not counting translations):
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Arch Linux
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Ark Linux
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Cygwin
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Fedora
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/FreeBSD
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Gentoo
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Kubuntu and Debian
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mac OS X
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mac OS X 10.5 issues
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mandriva
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Prerequisites
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Troubleshooting
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/3rd-party libraries
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building DBus
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building KDESupport Libraries
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building Qt 4
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Environment
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/GCC And MinGW
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Littlecms.patch
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/MS Visual Studio
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/MinGW Build Tips
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Windows Vista
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/additional libraries
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/emerge
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/kdesvn-build
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4/openSUSE
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4 Alpha 1
  • Getting Started/Build/KDE4 Alpha 2
That makes 30 pages. Some thoughts about this. Splitting up articles makes translation more difficult. There are more pages that have to be synced. It can be unclear where to find the information you are looking for. It's messy. What about
  • 1 page »Distribution Specials«, instead of 11 separated pages?
  • a cleanup instead of a split, if the page grows more and more?
  • talk pages sometimes fit better?
Agreed, if pages really get long, a meaningful split makes sense. But sometimes it does not!? Thoughts? :)

7 comments:

SaroEngels said...

Don't you dare to say a name? Wouldn't there be another way to contact us?
This is a pretty good starting point for working together ...

SaroEngels said...

ok, excuse me for my first comment, I was a bit upset.
The current Windows techbase/Getting_Started sites are Work and progress and shouldn't be translated before at least 4.1.
The contents will change within the next weeks and thus it makes no sense to invest any efforts.
If you could give some good help we could try and migrate some of the stuff to techbase/Project KDE on Windows, delete some stuff and make the current stuff more useful and suitable for translation.
In hope for better communication.
SE

dhaumann said...

Hi Saro, I've not at all thought about specific names when I wrote this. And that's really *not* what I wanted to say, see private mail :)

Ian Monroe said...

Mediawiki doesn't have any sort of translation framework, that's the real problem.

Mediawiki's strength is that its built to make Wikipedia work, it's weakness is that its built to make Wikipedia work. Wikipedia doesn't need translations (the separate languages are separate projects by and large) so Mediawiki doesn't have it.

dhaumann said...

Hi Ian,

that's true. But given all that I have to say it works pretty well :)

Unknown said...

Hi,

I'd support merging all the distro specifc pages if the result would be a short page. I think it should wait until we can instruct users to do `apt-get build-dep kdelibs5 kde4pimlibs kde4base kde4graphics` or equivalent on any recent distro. This currently does not work for trunk on kubuntu 7.10 because certain versions and metapackages are not up to date enough.

I think it's already quite simple for opensuse users so I'm sure in time it'll make sense to merge the pages. In the mean time I don't think people should need to wade through a lot of stuff that is not relevant to them.

That was also the reason for separating the troubleshooting section. It contains a lot of stuff that should not be encountered if using the .bashrc, distro packages, recent distro etc. For example:

If you get an error (in ubuntu) concerning libxtst.so install the libxtst-dev package

shouldn't really be in the troubleshooting section, but the prerequisites section. I didn't want to remove it, so I just put it out of the way.

There is also now an issue of where these discussions should take place. Keep it on blogs? Get techbase@lists.kde.org? Use http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=KDE_TechBase_talk:Contributors?

The ml would be my choice fwiw.

dhaumann said...

@stefeire: Agreed. Let's wait until it matures, maybe after KDE 4.1 :)