elYsiun.com recently installed the knowledge base on it’s server as a way of offering support to our members. However the information within the knowledge base is not up to date. Our administrators themselves are fairly busy so they can’t handle the task of getting the knowledge base up to date by themselves.
There for I would like to ask everyone who can, to help out by adding questions and the answers to them to the knowledge base.
Please note that you don’t need to log in to submit questions or answers to the knowledge base, only our administrators can log in to the knowledge base to commit the changes.
As a new user, I’ve browsed the knowledge base to see what I could find.To say I was disappointed is an understatement, and not a small one.
Questions answered there are so basic that they are all in the docs. And most are outdated. Pretty useless in final.
On the other hand, the content of “blender general” forum is very good but a pain to search and this a heavy traffic one. So perhaps it would be better to rebuild from scratch the kbase by including the content of the forum. I know it is a lot of work, but that can be made step by step and the first one could be to identify the reccuring questions which is not hard.
I second that. I think it is easier to start building the knowledge base from scratch (the info, not the code) because soooo much of the information is out of date. The best option, although probably not a feasible one, would be to somehow integrate the Blender Q&A forums with the knowledge base. Not sure how it would work, though.
I say start from scratch completly (including the information) thus the information will be updated by it self as people will ask questions, there is always a supply of newbies that will do that. Also that way they won’t be confused by the gigantic amount of information (much of it repeats it self) already exist.
I’ll write a few things if I have time. I haven’t written any tutorials yet or anything. (The first time I tried I discovered the fact that screen capture wasn’t working right). Anyhow, I’d be glad to contribute.
It’s out of date, since apparently there ARE plans for raytracing now (yafray is being integrated, right?) But there’s NO way to tell what version of Blender the responder was talking about. It could be version 0.9 for all I know. And there’s also no date to even give a rough idea how reliable this information might be. If it was dated 11-12-1999, then at least I would know to take it with a grain of salt, if it were dated last week then I would know it was probably believable. As it is you just have to take everything in the knowledge base with a big dose of skepticism, even though many entries are probably quite accurate and up to date.
SO: Every question/answer/comment should have a mandatory Blender version number attached to it (make it a popdown combobox or something that defauts to an invalid version), AND each should be automatically stamped with the date of submission.
If you did both of those things the knowledgebase would be much more useful. (And if it had been done this way to begin with it would really make it a lot easier today to isolate and clean out the really old cruft)
[edit]After seeing that entry I couldn’t just leave it like it was, so yeh, it is up-to-date now, but that doesn’t count :P[/edit]
I’ll throw in my vote, too, for starting over. And let’s redesign it too. The input-area for questions is not nearly large enough. Nor particularly is the area for replies. But then again, maybe we should just go ahead and take this whole concept “one step further.”
Maybe we should think about integrating this feature in some way with this forum. In other words, instead of duplicating the information, find a way to set up links to what’s already present here in the forums…
Some forum-software allows readers to “vote” on posts or threads. Perhaps the knowledge-base could literally consist of “those entries which have, on their own, garnered high votes.”
Otherwise we’re duplicating two efforts, and the knowledgebase would be demanding a fair amount of additional efforts just to maintain it. I think the KB has suffered (fatally) from that once, and could too-easily do so again.
We need to “improve its information content” and “improve its maintainability.” Because information is an indispensible resource to us all…
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Maybe from sratch is a good idea, but I would like to add that a question like:
23 How can I make explosions?
doesn’t belong here, obviously he/she didn’t bother to look for a decent tutorial.
I did try to awnser the question by suggesting a link: http://members.lycos.co.uk/stblender/explosion.html
From questions like these I get the impression the kbase is being (mis)used by peeps too lazy to use google(or any other search engine).
(sorry, don’t want to offend the person who asked the question, but entering “blender tutorial explosion” in a search engine doesnt look like a big deal to me:)
I disagree that knowledge gets “out of date”, I myself use an older version(2.25) besides the latest, and since blender is changing quite rapidly maybe a version nr should be added to every question to which version (or not) it appplies.
I have little time but will try to awnser more questions in the future (although my blender knowledge is limited, I can handle some of the less complicated ones;)
I’m kind of wondering when the knowlege base is going to be work on or upgraded, if you started I will like to help out by contributing some tutorials. Please let me know and encourage others to help out as well.
