Topic on User talk:Guillom/Roles and responsibilities

Do you have thoughts on how technical editors and writers fit into the picture?

For my part, I'm finding these things:

• a significant portion of the documentation is out-of-date
• that which is up-to-date is often incomplete or simply incorrect
• technical editors/writers need significant technical knowledge and research skills to be effective - even with these skills, they will also need support from the core devs on particularly challenging or unfamiliar topics

Documentation should be an explicit responsibility of everyone involved in the development process; i.e. the strategic product department should document the process that led to their decisions, same for the product manager, same for the designer, etc.

I'd argue it's the responsibility of each developer to create the appropriate documentation of the code they produce. As a consequence, I'd imagine the role of technical writers would be to gently nag everyone who falls behind on this task, that many dislike. In my view, technical writers shouldn't be the ones producing the documentation; they should be the ones making sure it stays up-to-date and complete.

How does that sound?