It's the season of the macabre and supernatural in many parts of the
world: Halloween, Día de los Muertos, Día de Todos Santos, and other
similar festivities. Jack-o'-lanterns are out 🎃, skeletons are hanging
💀, and zombies are lurking 🧟🧟 … even among us in KDE.
*Zombie documentation*, that is :) Documentation that may be obsolete,
duplicated, and unrelated to KDE that's eating the brains of unlucky
visitors and overburdoned maintainers.
For the Better Documentation goal [0,1], we are calling all KDE
contributors to help us slay the zombies lurking in our documentation!
*Who*: Whether a newbie or an old-timer, YOU are the zombie slayer we
need, join us
*What*: In Userbase wiki (https://userbase.kde.org), review and
approve the living-dead wiki pages marked for deletion or find those
pages needing to be deleted/archived; see below for details.
https://userbase.kde.org/Category:Proposed_deletion
*When*: Today until the end of November (and beyond, if needed)
*Why*: Better documentation requires getting rid of content that is
no longer helpful to end users, and may even eat their braaaiiinnns.
More seriously, deciding what to delete, and what to migrate and/or
rewrite is all part of better documentation. Your help removing cruft
now will make the process more manageable down the road. And in this age
of low-value slop abundance, less but usable documentation has so much
more value than lots but outdated or wrong.
Regarding deletion vs. archival, archival is preferred for translated
pages since translated terms that are specific to KDE may still have
value; see:
https://userbase.kde.org/Propose_Deletion#Translations.
For questions, comments, suggestions, reach out in the Matrix room. We
are not zombies, witches, or ghosts, so don't be shy.
#kde-docs:kde.org
Improving documentation also aligns with the KDE for Digital Sovereignty
work (#kde4digsov:kde.org). Migrating to new software requires excellent
end-user support, and that typically starts with excellent documentation.
Join us this season in slaying 🤺 the zombie documentation lurking in
the shadows of KDE!
Cheers,
Joseph
(on behalf of the champions and wiki maintainers)
[0] https://kde.org/goals/
[1] https://invent.kde.org/teams/goals/better-documentation
_Details_
URL for Userbase wiki: https://userbase.kde.org
Two ways to help:
(1) review and approve pages already marked for deletion, or
(2) find Userbase pages that should be marked with the "proposed
deletion" tag.
* (1) For pages already marked for deletion:
https://userbase.kde.org/Category:Proposed_deletion
If you work on a project listed there, or you know the software well,
review the wiki content and in the Discussion page let us know if
approve or disapprove of deletion/archival.
Archiving is a bit tricky, especially for translations, so it is
probably best left to someone with experience. Your review and approval
will help move that process forward more quickly!
* (2) Find other Userbase pages to delete/archive. Review the
documentation for software you know and see if it should be
deleted/archived. These pages should be marked with the "proposed
deletion" template. Share any additional comments in the Discussion page.
{{Proposed_deletion|reason=YOUR REASON }}
Documentation: https://userbase.kde.org/Propose_Deletion
Deleted information on MediaWiki can eventually be accessed again if
needed. Nonetheless, perhaps it is worth archiving pages with the
Wayback Machine from archive.org. That way our future
The focus of this call-to-action is deletion/archival, but you may come
across Userbase content that needs work. Don't hesitate to mark these
pages with a template:
https://userbase.kde.org/Category:Template
A general template which may be useful is the Todo one:
https://userbase.kde.org/Template:Todo
Other templates worth looking into: ObsoletePage, Improve, Being Edited,
Community App, Construction, Historic, IncompletePage, KDE3, KDE4,
KDE4/doc, KDE4/sandbox, Under Construction, and UnmaintainedSoftware
--
Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss (he/him)
KDE Eco Project & Community Manager
OpenPGP: 8FC5 4178 DC44 AD55 08E7 DF57 453E 5746 59A6 C06F
Matrix: @joseph:kde.org
Generally available Monday-Thursday from 10-16h CET/CEST. Outside of
these times it may take a little longer for me to respond.
KDE Eco: Building Energy-Efficient Free Software!
Website: https://eco.kde.org
Mastodon: @[email protected]
The content of this email is 100% from my own brain and not generated by
genAI/LLMs. For languages I do not speak, the use of machine translation
will be clearly stated and the original English text will also be included.
