Technical Document Re-working Group/Meetings/2019-03-08

Notes for Technical Writing SIG 2019-08-03

Attendees: Nick, Bryan, Sarah R.

Digging down into Wikitech/Toolforge documentation
- Help vs Portals?
  - Naming is by Bryan, and to make clear that they're not mainspace pages, mainspace pages are normally related to Ops/SRE work.
  - Portals are the main hubs that Bryan created, and pointed the inbound links (from external sites) to.
  - Who are the target demographics for each of these pages?
    - For WMCS?
      - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Our_audiences
    - For the site?
      - [? SRE, engineering teams, some volunteers like stewards, & WMCS as above]
  - Definitely lacking consistency, need a lot of work!
  - Admin subpages are operational runbooks by/for WMCS team, could be moved anywhere.
    - FAQs we have several
    - Consolidating information
    - User stories? Or What would a user want to do/know right away?
    - We need to pull the "Communication channels" info into a template, and just transclude it. I.e. these 3 semi-duplicates (and more?) https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge#Communication_and_support and https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_Services_Introduction#Communication_and_support and https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dvorapa/Toolforge_for_beginners#Ask_for_help
  - Next steps for MediaWiki API Technical Documentation: Updates, Qualitative interviews (suggested questions?), coverage (Core Platform is hiring a technical writer)
    - TODO: Sarah to talk to Evan/Cindy/Corey/Kate about tech writer plans. And make sure they've read Marty's intern work completely.
  - Technical Communication: Blogs and talks (updates/suggestions/help)
  - Hack-a-thon and Write-a-thon microtasks? What kind of tech doc tasks can folks complete over the course of a couple of hours? Looking for short/easy pieces for contributors to work on. (Let’s consolidate this all into one working list)
  - Reexamine SIG attendees?