Documentation/Contribute

Communication
At a place like MediaWiki, where anyone can edit, effective communication is especially important for sucessful collaborations.

Collaborators interact on the talk pages, Phabricator tasks, sometimes on Gerrit (code review), mailing lists and additional group chats like IRC, Zulip, Slack, etc. The following are some points to note while interacting with the Wikimedia community:


 * Follow Wikimedia's Code of conduct strictly.
 * Use simple language and a friendly, yet professional tone at all times.
 * Be mindful of the previous work done on a project and it's documentation.
 * Understand that a new contributor may work on a project in the future and include all necessary remarks and references in the talk page.

Checklist
A list of items to review your documentation against before publishing.


 * Verify if your document follows MediaWiki's documentation style guidelines, specifically the sections "Structuring pages" and "Language".
 * Check your content for any:
 * biases in writing.
 * gaps in the information.
 * Make sure your document is easy to translate.
 * Check if all the applicable categories are listed.

Historical outreach and community programs
2022 May: At the Wikimedia Hackathon, we had a discussion and gathered community input around documentation challenges, needs, opportunities, and priorities.

2022 July-Sept: Developer Advocacy tech writer quarterly goals are focused making it easier to assess the state of documentation and contribute meaningful improvements (project board in Phabricator). This includes work to:
 * Identify documentation collections and how to assess the state of the content they contain.
 * Make the results of this assessment publicly available and easy to navigate.

Friends of the docs

 * Wikimedia technical documentation: Friends of the Docs - Are you interested in connecting with other folks who are interested in Wikimedia, open source software, and technical documentation? Friends of the Docs meets from time to time to discuss documentation-related issues. There is also a Friends of the Docs Zulip stream where you can ask questions and start discussions.

Outreach programs

 * Google Season of the Docs - This program pairs technical writers with open-source organizations to improve technical documentation.
 * Outreachy - Outreachy is a diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living. Outreachy rounds often include projects based around technical documentation.