Thread:User talk:Zakgreant/MediaWiki Technical Documentation Plan/Some History/reply

Aloha HappyDog,

Many thanks for taking the time to write!

As I write in the plan, my goal is "... to improve MediaWiki’s developer documentation by making small, incremental improvements to the existing documentation process and infrastructure." I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Of course, what I think is a small change may be seen as a large change by others. :)

I'd love to pick your brain about what you've done (or hoped to do) and why you did it. If you don't mind, perhaps the fastest way to do this is through a series of voice chats that I can transcribe – this should let me make the best use of your limited time.

As for the focus of the plan, it is very clearly on just the developer documentation – this is what the WikiMedia Foundation folks have asked me to focus on (along with the Mediawiki Technical Operations documentation). I do agree that we should consider all of MediaWiki.org. I think that I need to gain expertise (and community trust) in one area before really thinking about the larger issue of what should be done with MediaWiki.org. This is another topic that I'd like to discuss further.

I agree with your breakdown of users – and have the same breakdown in my plan (though I do explicitly call out and consider translators and extension writers as separate groups.) I also agree with your view on how people have different roles, depending on the task that they are trying to perform.

On the issue of pages where each audience has distinct needs, I rely on careful structuring – and, in some cases, separate pages – to serve the different needs. Take CSRF as an example – the first sentence in the overview is meant to be something that any of the audiences to MediaWiki.org can understand. The next sentence is meant to serve technical users, as is the example. After these bits of intro, the writing is focused on the main audience of developers. I plan to follow this kind of structure for everything that I do major edits on.

I'll take a look at Project talk:Namespaces - I've got thoughts here, but I can see comments about that in another message. :)

With the Help: namespace, I'd like for us to just be able to ship that with the MediaWiki tarballs. I am sure that there are solid reasons why we don't do this, but it still should be fixed.

In dealing with old versions and documentation, there must be a way to deal with this relatively cleanly. I've been thinking that even just doing an HTML dump of the relevant bits of MediaWiki.org would be better than nothing. I do wonder if we couldn't handle it like translations. eg. Manual:$wgDBadminpassword/1.12 for the MediaWiki 1.12  docs.

Again, thanks for taking the time to engage!

Cheers!