Technical Document Re-working Group/Meetings/2018-07-09

Date -- August 10, 2018

 * Welcome new members to group (provide a quick overview and goals)
 * A number of folks traveled to Wikimania. It would be nice to hear if there was any sort of outcome from that. If folks who went could report back or point to notes.
 * There was a table for documentation -- folks came and went a bit
 * This hackathon's side-events/sessions were somewhat under-attended outside of the main hackathon: few attended the mentor matching, 1 person showed up for intro to phabricator.
 * At Wikimania folks who come to the hackathon seem to be pretty focused on projects already. How could this change for the program next year in Sweden? Perhaps a session or track for next year -- "So you don’t consider yourself a member of the tech community, here's what we are about and what you can do".
 * Some discussion about doing training for presenting
 * Quarterly goals related to documentation -- Developer Advocacy Team is working on improving pages related to action API documentation on Mediawiki. The goal is to identify the most used pages and improve those first, and to create a template that can be used to make it easy for others (hopefully volunteers) to document as well.
 * We discussed Quarry - specifically the ability to see what others are doing and your own history
 * We discussed: https://www.katacoda.com/ - You should spend 30 mins playing with this. Guided tutorial system, k8es and ??, that splits screen between commandline and examples. Technically like PAWS, but setup to do training.
 * We discussed the CDP for platform evolution: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technology/Annual_Plans/FY2019/CDP2:_Platform_Evolution#Outcome_1
 * Scoring team uses Swagger, ?.  We'd want our tutorials to be full of these examples.
 * Quarry's system for marking "draft/published" could be expanded. Perhaps add a 3rd "example" type. [?]
 * Technical Writer is working on a couple of resources -- a technical writing genre page to collect examples and best practices of different kinds of technical writing. Considering using a maturity model to show types of docs at different levels of the spectrum of good documentation for open organizations.
 * Preparing to begin wrangling the documentation phabricator board where there are plenty of outstanding tasks that simply need to be done. By directly addressing and closing some tickets here, we can start modeling for others that they can report issues about documentation, and it will be addressed -- but we can also socialize that documentation is everyone’s job. It’s not enough to file a ticket saying, “We need x,y, or z)
 * Do we want a new #tag to distinguish from the 600+ open tasks? - if so, need to clearly define audiences
 * Do we want new columns, perhaps task-based, to make the work needed clearer? E.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/scoring-platform-team
 * We held the first in a series of open organization/open documentation/dev advocate meetups. Really excited about this! It seemed like the attendees were pretty engaged. Folks seemed as interested in the open source community culture discussion as the open documentation discussion -- so it might be nice to do a special topics meetup next where we really just talk about what it means (in the here and now) to contribute to an open source community.
 * User feedback mechanism: still need it. How do we get it? Would Central Notice be a possibility? Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA?banner=B1819_0701_mlWW_dsk_p2_sm_template&force=1&country=US
 * NW: Is this to resolve https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T195119 ?   Do we want it just at Wikitech?  or also at Mediawiki-wiki, too? or even wider?  Wikitech isn't SUL, so isn't covered by CentralNotice. I don't think SiteNotice has that kinda power :/
 * Still think it could be a gadget that ties into Schema system
 * Documentation Hub / Portal -- should we have a central place that points to resources, needs, and support?
 * Documentation types and examples that exhibit best practices?
 * See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_Document_Re-working_Group/Resources (add or organize freely)
 * See Document Types examples: User:SRodlund (WMF)/tips for document genres