As a member of both the Ubuntu Documentation Project and the KDE Documentation Project, one thing is clear, our current state of system help isn’t the greatest. An initiative that the GNOME project has looked at taking on (for the greater part of the past 3 years) is called Project Mallard. There are some things in this project that I like and dislike, however one thing is clear, they understand the inefficiency of their current system and know it needs to be fixed. KDE is realizing this same exact thing and know we need to fix it, but figuring out how to do so correctly, isn’t the easiest thing.

One thing that GNOME, KDE, and others have worked hard to do is collaborate with Freedesktop.org specifications on many levels. Maybe it is time we look at continuing this excellence, but this time add documentation to the menu. How many of you GNOME users love using Amarok or another KDE application, but hate the fact that KHelpCenter is installed just so you can view the help documentation? Granted a lot of this has been fixed by just recommending KHelpCenter in the packages, but this doesn’t fix the issue, because now you have a .docbook file to read, and guess what, Yelp isn’t going to open it cleanly for you, or at least the last time I looked at Yelp it didn’t. Or you have KDE and want to open up the .xml file with KHelpCenter, but it just doesn’t work correctly. I think if we were to unify documentation we could move toward the goal of world domination 🙂

Would working closely together help fix our issues, would this be a good thing? What would be the “best” way to move forward?