Documentation/Documentation Review Processes

Reviewing a documentation
This document describes the steps and approach to reviewing updated and newly created documentation across Wikimedia projects, this document is meant to guide you through each phase of the review process.

Review Processes
The documentation review processes is in three phases;


 * Prototype/Self review
 * Technical review
 * Non-technical review

Prototype/Self review
The writer of the documentation is always its first reviewer.

This step involves a writer thoroughly going through their own documentation and making sure it follows Wikimedia's documentation style guides, formatting, methodologies, and use of language. This helps the reviewer identify their own mistakes and makes sure the documentation conforms with the style guide.

Additionally, the author of the documentation can have a colleague review the documentation for them informally, this enables the author to get feedback from peers (who might as well be the users of the documentation).

Technical review
This phase would require a senior/fellow colleague or the team authoring the documentation to go through the documentation and check for technical accuracy, completeness of its content, and how easy it would be for new contributors to adapt. Comprehensive responses and feedback would be gotten here.

Non-technical review
The review phases above are done by the team or person who authored the document. Often, documentarians and reviewers have more knowledge of the style guides, formatting, methodologies, and use of language. Therefore, it is required that a documentarian formally reviews any documentation that undergoes this process. The responsibility of the documentarian will be to ascertain that the documentation conforms with Wikimedia's style guides.

The Non-technical review is done using the Documentation Review Workboard (Link to be added) on Phabricator, this workboard has two columns, "needs-review" and "in-review", and the review would be in the following steps.


 * A Phabricator task is created for a document that needs a Non-technical review, the task should describe the documentation that needs a review, provide a link to it, and request for a review.
 * The created task should be moved to the "needs-review" column to indicate that the task needs a review.
 * A reviewer you contacted or one who is interested in reviewing the documentation goes to the "needs-review" column to pick a document to review and starts a discussion with you in the tasks comment.
 * A task currently being reviewed is moved to the "in-review" column by the reviewer.
 * Once the review is done, the reviewer marks the task as "resolved".

Who should use this review process?
This review process is absolutely open to everyone to use, it can be used for newly created documentation as well as documentation that is being updated.