Wikimedia technical documentation: Friends of the Docs

Welcome to Friends of the Docs!



What is Friends of the Docs?
Friends of the Docs is a group that is open to all members of the Wikimedia technical community who are interested in advocating for better technical documentation for Wikimedia projects. The group is meant to be a fun opportunity to meet, discuss technical documentation, and share ideas about improving technical documentation and growing the community of contributors.

We recommend watching Heather Stenson's talk "A Friend of the Docs is a Friend of Mine" to learn more about the theory behind Friends of the Docs.

Focus areas
Working together as a community, we aim to:
 * identify top priorities to improve and elevate technical documentation across Wikimedia projects,
 * create standard requirements and processes for creating new tutorials and other technical documents,
 * update and refine existing technical documentation
 * identify and support advocates for better technical documentation, and
 * have fun!!!

Participate
If you are working on technical documentation on Wikimedia projects, congratulations, you are already a Friend of the Docs!

Our aim is to help facilitate opportunities for Friends of the Docs to meet and discuss technical documentation. We'll do this by supporting monthly meetings and providing channels where discussions can take place.

The scope of Friends of the Docs is not static. The goal is to evolve and grow over time, as we propose, experiment, learn, and apply our learning.

Upcoming meetings

 * Wednesday July 21, 2020, 3 PM UTC
 * Meeting link coming soon
 * Join the discussion on Zulip!

 Agenda: 
 * Featured discussion: Using PAWS as a documentation tool
 * Five helpful MediaWiki templates for designing documentation
 * Group discussion: What are your favorite templates for documentation? How can we make it easier to use templates in documentation pages?
 * Questions and feedback

Discussion and contact
Our primary coordination and discussion takes place via our Friends of the Docs Zulip stream.

The talk page will be used for our primary coordination. It is also a place to suggest potential future focuses.

Recommended resources

 * Conversations and Community: The Social Web for Documentation Anne Gentle
 * Any friend of the docs is a friend of mine: Cultivating a community of documentation advocates Heather Stenson
 * Technical_Document_Re-working_Group/Resources

Historical meeting notes and minutes

 * Past members of the Working Group
 * Sarah R. Rodlund - Chair
 * Bryan Davis
 * Aaron Halfaker
 * Nick Wilson

The group was formerly a membership-based special interest group that applied a process of auditing, extension, review, and iteration to Wikimedia technical documentation, but was limited to improving Scoring Platform team and Cloud Services documentation. In October 2019, the group was renamed to Friends of the Docs.

Meetings from when the group was the Technical Document (Re)working Group

Subpages

 * Technical Document Re-working Group/Resources, Further reading links
 * Technical Document Re-working Group/Technical Communication Outreach and Events
 * Suggested task lists:
 * Technical Document Re-working Group/WriteTheDocs (2018)
 * Technical Document Re-working Group/Wikimania 2018