Comments from the Hackathon discussion etherpad and meeting chat transcript:
Working in collaboration with others (mentors, ppl with shared interests):
-- I prefer to be given a mentor whom I can collaborate with while learning the ropes. I do my most effective and efficient work when given a task by someone I can work with. (+1)
-- "Definitely in collaboration" (+1)
-- " Collaboration is definitely for me"
-- "Help people with particular interests find one another. I know this is off-topic but I am now documenting tax administrative details of being a proper not-for-profit Wikimedia chapter in the US. Should you file form 5768, for example? Why? I know this is not called technical documentation but it's similar. If we find one another we can document some things together."
Tightly-scoped or bite-size tasks and checklists:
-- "It depends on the scope of the problem. Small bitesize issues are good for getting feet wet, but without a large grasp of the entire system you can't have the perspective for holistic improvements, and there needs to be a way to get across that gap"
-- "I think tasks are very important to work like this and I like the idea of a checklist. Maybe seeing documentation as a mega-project filled with small tasks can help us to make problems visible and tackle them better."
-- "A checklist of bite-sized chunks is helpful for getting started making improvements"
Strategies: docs live with code and are updated with code changes:
-- "Importance of having documentation live with the code, so it can be integrated with continous integration to remind developers to update the docs."
-- "In an ideal world, documentation would be written by people who wrote the code.
--> Counter: Helpful to have an outside perspective
--> Actually Wikipedia works partly because person A may be able simply and clearly explain some basics of the advanced work that person B is doing, whereas B would get caught up in the details or hard cases or conflicts with others. This is common in sci and tech I believe.
-- * Related to this - how can we sync with other documentation-adjacent tools programmers use on a daily basis - Git/Github, Markdown, javadocs, etc - might there be a way to integrate these more closely?"
-- "Accountability processes: How to keep people accountable for updating documentation when code is updated?"
Strategies: promote standard cleanup templates
-- "Wider usage of the specific cleanup templates, e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation/Style_guide/templates "
Strategies: doc support channel(s)
-- "A clearer location for docs-specific questions (Q&A). There are E_TOO_MANY_TALKPAGES to choose between, many of which are unwatched (by the 'right' people)."