WMF Projects/Technical Documentation

This is a WMF project page for the technical documentation work.

Overview
MediaWiki's documentation is quite useful. Hundreds of people have authored and edited thousands of pages of documentation that cover a significant portion of what is known about MediaWiki. Unfortunately, the content varies greatly in accuracy, completeness, content, page structure, translation status, writing style and quality. This inconsistency makes the documentation hard for many people to use.

Activities for September to December 2010
Over the next few months, Zak Greant will be focused on helping the community improve MediaWiki's developer documentation, along with thes technical documentation processes. During this time, he'll be working on three key things: community engagement, editing, writing and wiki gardening, and testing, collaborating and planning.

Scope
At present, work in this area is focused on the MediaWiki developer documentation.

Community engagement
A large part of the documentation work has been done by MediaWiki community members. This project is meant to provide support to them as they continue this work.

To help Zak work with the community in ways that follow community norms, he's been doing the following:
 * logging into the relevant IRC channels while working
 * reading and participating in the relevant mailing lists
 * reviewing the Special:OldReviewedPages and Special:RecentChanges lists for MediaWiki.org, editing and approving where possible

To help community members keep up with Zak's activities, he has been:
 * keeping a public todo list at User:Zakgreant/Todo
 * posting daily activity logs (such as User:Zakgreant/Log/2010-10-05)
 * posting weekly reports (such as User:Zakgreant/Report/2010-10-03)
 * holding two IRC office hour sessions (scheduled 12 hours apart, to help accomodate a wide range of time zones) per week

'''Thanks for reading - more soon (or view the source to see a few extra comments.)