Documentation/Toolkit/Collection audit

This page contains information to help you audit a collection of technical documentation and determine a strategy to improve it.

Process overview
Step 1: Determine documentation goals
 * You are here! Start your collection audit by defining your audience and scoping your topic.

Step 2: Survey
 * Understand the documentation landscape and how your topic relates to others. Go to Step 2

Step 3: Prioritize
 * Focus and scope your doc improvement work. Go to Step 3

Step 4: Assess
 * Determine the improvements necessary to address information overload, gaps, and doc maintenance challenges. Go to Step 4

Step 1: Define the goals and audience of your documentation collection
Before you start assessing your docs, take a moment to consider why they should exist.


 * Why does someone need to know about the topics your docs cover? Try to fill in the following sentences:
 * "These docs will help ______ [audience] to understand what _____ [technology/project/process] is, and how to use it to _____ [do what?]."
 * "After visiting these docs, ______ [audience] should be able to ______ [do what?]."


 * What will happen if you don't create or improve these docs? What is the problem?
 * "Without these docs, ______ [audience] will continue to be confused about ______ [technology/project/process]."
 * "Without these improvements, it will be harder for ______[audience] to ______ [do what?]."

Your answers to this question will be crucial as you audit your content to determine what is essential, and what should be archived or moved.

Resources to help with this step
Explore Documentation/Audiences_for_Wikimedia_technical_documentation to find out about the types of people who use Wikimedia technical documentation and their motivations.

Next step
In the next step, you'll survey the docs to understand the current landscape and how your topic relates to others. Get ready to feel some empathy for your readers! Go to Step 2.