Who Says Penguins Can't Fly?

As Anne already blogged about, I suggested during the WebWorld sprint that we try to strengthen the UserBase Wiki image. I made two proposals:

• Whenever UserBase is mentioned the first time in a new context, call it “UserBase Wiki” or “KDE UserBase Wiki” if the context doesn’t make it clear that it’s KDE-related. The reason for this is that many people have mentioned that they didn’t know what a “userbase” was, and that they weren’t aware that UserBase actually is a wiki anyone can edit.
• Give UserBase its own unique logo.

I had made a rough logo based on the idea “Connect the pieces” and intended to simply replace the KDE icon in the sidebar, but Claus and Anne saw another mockup I had made (for a completely different purpose) and thought it would look good with some text as well. Brilliant idea, strangely enough I hadn’t even thought about it – isn’t it wonderful to work with other people? During the sprint we set on “Share your Knowledge” and asked our logo creator Eugene to make a logo for us. Here’s the result:

Of course you should just head over to UserBase directly and see it in action. If you still see the old KDE logo you might have to refresh your cache, Shift + F5 in most browsers.

Finally, a reminder:

UserBase is a wiki for KDE users, made by KDE users. Registration is no longer necessary to contribute. Share your Knowledge »

Today was another warm and sunny day at Linuxhotel in Essen, where the first KDE WebWorld sprint was held, but the increasing cloudiness and predicted rain in the afternoon meant that it was time to pack and go home. A lot of things have happened during these days, so here’s a summary (because Ingo forced me to do one):

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If you follow the planet you should know about WebWorld 2011 by now, but if you don’t this picture summarizes it quite well:

In this post I’ll write about what the KDE UserBase Wiki team has worked on during the first day – and it’s quite much in just one day! The wiki has always had much potential in my opinion, but unfortunately not too many contributors. We want to change that.

• Everyone is a potential contributor. To lower the entry barrier further, we now allow non-registered users to edit pages. This is great news for those who just want to make spontaneous contributions. However, registering has many benefits and is still recommended.
• Everyone can contribute. We have made small changes to the sidebar and the pages for contributors to make it clearer. Hopefully this will make it easier for new contributors to get started.
• Details are important as well. It is awesome to have all these different people gathered here in the same place (and what a wonderful place it is). This has allowed us to quickly fix a bunch of small and some larger issues with UserBase. Those are issues the user shouldn’t experience in the first place so I won’t go into any details, let’s just say that it has improved the user experience of the wiki. There has also been improvements in the translation tools, small tweaks in the style and other nice stuff.

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