User:Pavithraes/Sandbox/New technical writers

Overview
This article contains useful resources for new technical writers to get started.

Basics
See Help:Contents.
 * 1) Sign up for a Wikimedia account.
 * 2) Learn to create and edit Mediawiki pages (Wikis). Wikis can be edited using the source or visual editor. Wiki markup is used for formating the text.
 * 1) Search and navigate Mediawiki pages effectively. Checkout Special:AllPages and Namespaces.
 * 2) Learn to use templates.
 * 3) Go through the Wikimedia Documentation Style Guide.
 * 4) Familiarize yourself with the task tracking tool Phabricator and code repository Gerrit. Also see, Set up your development environment and Communicate that you work on a task at How to become a MediaWiki hacker.
 * 5) For discussions, join IRC and mailing lists.

Contributing

 * Edit pages on the go. You might come across outdated, missing or incorrect content when you refer to certain pages. Make changes to the docs, file a bug report or create a new task in Phabricator. Note to discuss the issue on the talk page and understand the task creation terms on Phabricator before proceeding. See Technical documentation prioritization.
 * Work on a documentation task. The tasks tagged 'good-first-bugs' are beginner friendly.
 * Write new documentation, new templates, READMEs, etc. See User:Pavithraes/Sandbox/Technical documentation templates and suggestions.
 * Translate a page.

Suggestions for new writers

 * 1) Developer documentation is your primary reference; IRC, mailing lists, source code, etc., are secondary.
 * 2) Use the search bar in the top right instead of google-search for mediawiki specific search results.
 * 3) Before making major edits or starting a new page, you can create a page in your Sandbox. Replace username with your Wikimedia username and pagename with the name of the page you want to create at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:username/Sandbox/pagename.

Documentation structure
Mediawiki's developer and end-user documentation can seem overwhelming to newcomers. Here's an imperfect outline:
 * On mediawiki.org:
 * A Technical Manual for information about the MediaWiki Software.
 * Project based documentation. This includes user guides, tutorials, development information and reference materials related to specific projects.
 * Help pages contain end-user specific documentation and Special pages provide some on-demand documentation.
 * An API reference in svn is auto-generated from the MediaWiki source code using the Doxygen tool.
 * Text files in the /docs directory of MediaWiki’s source tree have code related information.

Supporting resources include blogs, talk pages and discussion forums.

Note: Some documentation is yet to be migrated from meta.wikimedia.org. See Meta:MetaProject_to_transfer_content_to_MediaWiki.org

Documentation audiences
The following table points to the most useful pages for different types of documentation users.