Wikimedia Technical Documentation
Empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain.
For information about how to find and create technical documentation, see:
Documentation
This page documents the work and processes of the
Wikimedia Foundation Technical Documentation Team
(Tech Docs Team).
Our mission is to empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain.
The document or site works when target users can find what they need, understand what they find, and act on it confidently.
—"Five Steps to Plain Language",
centerforplainlanguage.org
Open-source software is an essential part of the Wikimedia movement. It provides platforms for content, enables us to expand our reach, and encourages us to look at knowledge is new ways. Documentation is the method through which software can be shared, and built collaboratively
. Our mission is to ensure that everyone who wants to use or contribute to Wikimedia software can easily find and use the information they need. This work builds on over 20 years of technical documentation by the Wikimedia technical community. It strives to make technical information more accessible, more inclusive, and more reliable so that open-source software can continue to empower the Wikimedia mission.
Drive documentation work with data
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Documentation success is notoriously difficult to measure. However, in order to prioritize our work and create a shared understanding of documentation quality, we must establish metrics, based on quantitative and qualitative methods, for measuring documentation health and tracking improvements.
Documentation effectively meets users’ information needs
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Better understanding the health of our technical documentation across technical areas enables us to identify where the need for improvement – and potential for impact – is greatest. Technical writers provide documentation strategy to support critical user journeys across products and projects. Our holistic view of Wikimedia technical content helps us create and structure content for multiple, overlapping audiences. As partners in development workflows, technical writers provide a crucial user-focused perspective, helping improve our technology so that it needs less documentation.
Build the culture of documentation
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The Wikimedia technical ecosystem spans hundreds of services, extensions, libraries, and tools, created by both staff and volunteers. To effectively manage technical documentation at this scale, we must empower Wikimedians across the movement to create and manage docs. This requires community outreach, self-service tools, and processes that support (and require) documentation updates. We must also invest in automated tools, like CI-based documentation checks and content linters, to make it easier for everyone to participate in maintaining great docs.
For more details, read our updates on
Talk:Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
, and visit our
workboard on Phabricator
We maintain the following projects that align with our team goals. Maintenance responsibilities include reviewing patch requests, fixing critical bugs, monitoring wiki pages, and monitoring Phabricator projects.
The
Developer Portal
is a static website that helps people find Wikimedia technical documentation. For more information, see the
project documentation
Documentation
and its subpages provide resources to help you find technical documentation, improve your docs or your writing, and get involved in contributing to Wikimedia technical documentation efforts.
(Beta) The
API Portal
is an experimental API documentation and OAuth credential management wiki, including a wiki instance at
api.wikimedia.org
, a
skin
, and an
extension
The
API spec reader
is a tool that renders
OpenAPI specifications
with a built-in sandbox. For more information, see the
project documentation
The
mediawiki-api-demos repository
contains sample apps for MediaWiki Action API tutorials, sample code for MediaWiki Action API docs, and code for the
MediaWiki Apps Gallery
doc.wikimedia.org
is a platform for Wikimedia technical documentation, including static sites and generated docs. We lead the documentation strategy for the platform.
In partnership with WMF frontend teams, we co-maintain the Wikimedia
theme
for generated JavaScript documentation on doc.wikimedia.org, including leading documentation strategy, triaging and implementing minor fixes and enhancements, and releasing new versions.
Technical documentation dashboard:
Documentation linting tools:
Doc metrics generator:
"Documentation orients newcomers to open-source projects, helps them overcome technical and process barriers, and increases their self-efficacy". Balali, S., Steinmacher, I., Annamalai, U.
et al.
Newcomers’ Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors’ and Newcomers’ Barriers in OSS Projects.
Comput Supported Coop Work
27
, 679–714 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9310-8