Would we pitch a documentation track at the Hack-a-thon?
A mix of creating new pages, analysing existing pages ("show us where you get stuck"), updating existing sections, creating new screenshots, bugfixing the tool that used to take multilingual screenshots, etc.
Final Recommendation memo from BSU Students
Post-mortem / retro the design of working w/students. Discussed possible outreach to other universities. It would be great to talk about different ways we can engage them.
The prof mentioned the idea of us taking on a technical writing intern (grad student working on a final project), and I’d like to talk about this in our group. If it is feasible, it might help This could solve some of our resourcing requests -- and help us model scalable solutions for professional contributions to documentation projects.
Working on a WMCS/Wikimedia technical writing best practices and style guide
Link to in-progrss style guide will be added soon.
Can we start bucketing the pages we've worked on, by various criteria? Target-audiences, doc-types (manual, reference pages, walkthroughs, tutorials, FAQs, Index, etc).
4 (general) types of software documentation (tutorial, how-to, explanation, reference) -- https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/ -- I like the distinction between tutorial (learning) and how-to (goal) there too
Most of what we currently have qualifies as "reference" or "how to." Our biggest gap is probably "walkthrough."
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/My_first_Flask_OAuth_tool for example is a swiss-cheese reference; it has many holes!
Are we making an organized cover-to-cover manual, or improving individual pages one-at-a-time. How do we make the incremental approach work for us?
Use the FAQ to fill in the Outline. Outline-first approach.
Other priority - getting better discussion amongst the people actively doing docs interventions.
Avoiding fragmentation of efforts -- discuss the Wikimedia Resource Center and its efforts to create a Style Guide for program coordinators with templates for specific genres. We should definitely get ahead of this and talk about how the WMCS | Technology Style Guide can be inclusive enough to guide how others are doing documentation across Tech and other Foundation projects.
Barcelona Hackathon Project -- what to bring? Possible work on a Scoring Platform Manual or Scoring Platform related doc. This is an ambitious project and probably a great one to work with community members on in terms of doing the bulk of the writing and coaching on format, style and voice. This might be a project to begin mentoring technical collaborators through completion. Also - would like to discuss engaging a design researcher to help do some interviews at the hackathon -- I think we may be able to have some help from Daisy Chen.
X year goal: have docs recommendations for "So you want to write a new Foo. We recommend creating these docs types, in this order."
