Technical Document Re-working Group/Meetings/2019-03-08

Notes for Technical Writing SIG 2019-08-03

Attendees: Nick, Bryan, Sarah R.


 * Digging down into Wikitech/Toolforge documentation
 * Help vs Portals?
 * Naming is by Bryan, and to make clear that they're not mainspace pages, mainspace pages are normally related to Ops/SRE work.
 * Portals are the main hubs that Bryan created, and pointed the inbound links (from external sites) to.
 * Who are the target demographics for each of these pages?
 * For WMCS?
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Our_audiences
 * For the site?
 * [? SRE, engineering teams, some volunteers like stewards, & WMCS as above]
 * Definitely lacking consistency, need a lot of work!
 * Admin subpages are operational runbooks by/for WMCS team, could be moved anywhere.
 * FAQs we have several
 * Consolidating information
 * User stories? Or What would a user want to do/know right away?
 * We need to pull the "Communication channels" info into a template, and just transclude it. I.e. these 3 semi-duplicates (and more?) https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge#Communication_and_support and https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_Services_Introduction#Communication_and_support and https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dvorapa/Toolforge_for_beginners#Ask_for_help
 * Next steps for MediaWiki API Technical Documentation: Updates, Qualitative interviews (suggested questions?), coverage (Core Platform is hiring a technical writer)
 * TODO: Sarah to talk to Evan/Cindy/Corey/Kate about tech writer plans. And make sure they've read Marty's intern work completely.
 * Technical Communication: Blogs and talks (updates/suggestions/help)
 * Hack-a-thon and Write-a-thon microtasks? What kind of tech doc tasks can folks complete over the course of a couple of hours? Looking for short/easy pieces for contributors to work on. (Let’s consolidate this all into one working list)
 * Reexamine SIG attendees?