In my “quest” to update KDE-related Wikipedia articles, I had to do more research than I expected and I needed to fix things I didn’t expect. But that research was fun, too. It brought me back in time when I was still a teen who tried to get some ancient Linux distribution working and fiddled around with KDE 1.

After many website transitions, much info on KDE.org got kinda lost. For example, there seems no longer to be a proper announcement of KDE 1.1. The KDE website doesn’t have it. Can’t find it in the mailing list archives of kde-announce@kde.org either. There are only two places where I could find when 1.1 was released: The Way Back service of Archive.org and a backup of the news archives of KDE’s previous website in SVN. After I found the exact date, I took the liberty to at very least add the date to the KDE 1.1 changelog which is still linked from KDE’s announcements page (the KDE 1.x changelogs had white text on white background — there as well I took the liberty to modify the files).

That brings me to an earlier problem: When was KDE Beta 1 released? After much digging I found out, that pretty much all old announcements (except for KDE 1.1 and KOffice 1.0) still reside in KDE’s SVN and those can even be accessed via web browser. http://kde.org/announcements/beta1announce.php works, but it’s not linked from the announce page either along with most other announcements that old.

Next problem: Some dude uploaded a screenshot of KDE 1.1 to Wikimedia Commons and labeled it KDE 1.0. Wow, great. When I looked for real KDE 1.0 screenshots, the whole internet seemed to use exactly the same image. The Way Back service wasn’t of any use either. No backups of KDE.org of that time in their archives. Screenshot of KDE Beta 3, yes. Screenshots of 1.1, too. After many searches I found an image on a Spanish blog that should be KDE 1.0. Needless to say that I replaced the wrong image with this one and re-uploaded the wrong image again as 1.1.

Now KDE 1.x is in good shape in German Wikipedia. I don’t know what I do next: Update the chapter about KDE 2.x or extend the English KDE 1 article…

I wouldn’t mind if one of you extended the English article. All references are in English, so using the German article as base should be possble even if you don’t speak English.

Btw, during my research I found – in retrospect funny – articles which I’d like to share with you:

ArsTechnica reviews SuSE Linux 6.0 with KDE 1.0

ArsTechnica reviews KDE 1.1

LinuxToday’s outlook to KDE 2.0

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