User:Pavithraes/Sandbox/Technical writer guide

Overview
Effective technical documentation is a product of effective planning, production and presentation. This document aims to help technical writers.

Steps to writing technical documentation

 * 1)  Clearly define the context and purpose of the documentation.  This will help focus your ideas in the right direction. The best way to define your purpose is to have a secific problem statement that your documentation solves. An important part of this step is to outline the topics your documentation should and shouldn't cover.
 * 2)  Understand your audience. Take a moment to think about who your intended readers are, their background, their level of expertise, etc. This will help you recognize the best way to deliver your content.
 * 3)  Decide on a document genre once the purpose and audience are clear. See templates and suggestion.
 * 4)  Collect relevant content for the document. This is an elaborate and time consuming step. The content forms the foundation of your documentation. See #content_collection_strategy for more information.
 * 5)  Give the content a rough structure  before creating your first draft. It helps you organize your thoughts and have a clear mental map during the writing phase. It is important to keep the structure flexible. Refer to the Styel, guide.
 * 6)  Create your draft using any text editor you're comfortable with. Add hyperlinks, format the text, etc wherever necesasary.
 * 7)  Proofread and review the document agains the checklist. 

Content collection strategy
Documentation users care more about the quality of documentation than the quantity of information, and the quality of documentation directly depends on the quality of content.


 * Start, dont end with Wikipedia.
 * Besides websites, books, articles and research papers are good reference materials.
 * Going through simialr technical documentation of other open source projects will help you get new ideas.
 * Make sure to refer to mediawiki/wikitecth/etc. pages to aviod content duplication and include useful references.
 * Sometimes the codebase and phabricator tasks also are good places to find information.