Wikimedia technical documentation: Friends of the Docs/Meetings/2020-09-23

Attendees: Alex Paskulin, Pavithra Eswaramoorthy, Bryan Davis, Sarah R, Nick Wilson, Juan Lara, Gbadebo Bello, Yaron Koren, Trey

Notes:

• Open questions and discussion
  • Trey: How to handle edits to translated wiki pages? I'm working on edits to <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch>
    • Nick: You can look at the number of languages. If it's only a few, it's not as bad as 10+. You can look at the active translations and try to work around those sections. Updates are good, but changing sentences for style/tone will cause translations to be marked as outdated. If you look at the translations, outdated sections are highlighted in pink.
• Work together on moving https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_tutorials from draft to finished.
  • The Wikimedia tutorials page was inspired by Dan Shick based on https://ubuntu.com/tutorials Let's take a look at that page and note the things that we like about it.
    • Difficulty rating: This is relative to your existing experience, so it's hard to apply a consistent "difficulty" rating across all tutorials. Instead, we could use a tag to indicate tutorial that are friendly to newcomers.
    • There are tutorials in multiple languages. It would be nice to include language as a filter.
    • "Add a tutorial" links to their Discourse home page
  • Review the wiki page and choose a few improvements to make
    • It would be nice to be able to filter using the topics. The MediaWiki Cargo extension can provide this functionality. We could also write a gadget to be enabled on this page that would help us filter and refine. There are some improvements we could make to Template:Topic to make this easier.
      • High level gadget idea: create a gadget (prototype as a user script!) that adds search/filter behavior to the page by first walking the DOM to extract the topics, keywords, etc that can be used for filtering. Then add inputs to the page via js that are bound to events that walk the collected data and show/hide divs as approriate. The js used in Hay's Directory is relatively easy to understand. Template:Topic adds a `data-topic="..."` attribute now. Something like `$("span[data-topic=Python]")` will find all the "Python" topic tags. And something like `$("span[data-topic=Python]").parents(".mw-tpl-colorbox").css( "border", "2px red solid" )` would then highlight the cards that contain the Python topic tag.
      • Compare: https://hay.toolforge.org/directory/
    • Check for color blindness accessibility for tags (See also: Dispenser talk at Wikimania)
      • Resources: https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/#fig:scheme_light, https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=diverging&scheme=RdYlBu&n=6, https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter?orig_uri=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility/Colors&process_type=protan
    • As the length increases, how can we organize? Could we add headings?
  • Discuss where we can link to this page to increase visibility
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers —Trey
    • Front page (Get help and contribute) (Sarah R)
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute (as another line) - Alex
    • https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits
  • Tutorials to add
    • https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/How_to
  • Alphabetical ordering
  • Is there a way to organize by task?
  • Add a guide to the page about adding a good description: Consider what will the person learn? What will the person learn?
  • Description Rewrites
    • Suggested rewrites to describe what you learn in each tutorial.
    • Tips for writing a description: Describe what the reader will learn in the tutorial, "Learn how to... by....". For broad topics like the Action API, be specific about what areas of the topic the tutorial covers.
    • Article ideas generator: Build an article ideas generator app that suggests articles from various categories that don't yet exist on English Wikipedia.
      • Rewrite: Learn how to use the MediaWiki Action API Parse and Links modules by building an app that generates article ideas.
    • Nearby places viewer: Learn how to search for wiki pages near your location using the MediaWiki Action API
      • Rewrite: Learn to use the MediaWiki Action API's Geoserach module by searching for wiki pages near your location.
    • Picture of the day viewer: Build a Wikipedia:Picture of the day viewer using the MediaWiki Action API
      • Rewrite: Learn how to use the MediaWiki Action API Images and Imageinfo modules by building a picture of the day viewer.

Outcomes:

• Before and after on Wikimedia tutorials: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_tutorials&type=revision&diff=4131159&oldid=3942348
• Changes to Template:Topic: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3ATopic&type=revision&diff=4129297&oldid=4126754
• Change to How to contribute: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=How_to_contribute&type=revision&diff=4129434&oldid=4035927
• Changes to New Developers: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=New_Developers&type=revision&diff=4129301&oldid=3955715
• Opened https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263766 for new gadget idea