User:SRodlund (WMF)/Wikimedia technical documentation resources

Overview

Style guides, templates, and tools

Strengthen your technical writing skills

Planning for better docs

Docs community and outreach programs

Documentation workboard

Overview

Quality technical documentation is very important to the accessibility, growth, and sustainability of Wikimedia technical projects.

Who uses technical documentation for Wikimedia projects?

For a more comprehensive exploration of the types of people who use Wikimedia technical documentation and their motivations, see Audiences for Wikimedia technical documentation.

Why contribute to technical documentation?

Technical documentation is an important part of Wikimedia technical projects. Quality documentation is especially important for open-source projects where folks from all over the world are working together. It provides history, context, accurate information, and repeatable steps that people can follow.

If you are interested in contributing to Wikimedia's technical projects, improving technical documentation can be a good starting place.

Where to find Wikimedia technical documentation

There are many Wikimedia technical projects, and sometimes it can be difficult to determine the best place to find or publish technical documentation. Following is a list of the main places to find Wikimedia technical documentation.

• MediaWiki - MediaWiki software documentation and technical documentation for many other Wikimedia technology projects. This is the default space for publishing technical documents about Wikimedia technology.
• Wikitech - Technical documentation for Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure and services. This includes production clusters, Wikimedia Cloud Services, Toolforge hosting, the Beta Cluster, and other data services.
• Wikidata - Technical documentation related to the Wikidata project, particularly the Tools page.
• PAWS - Documentation about PAWS, Wikimedia's hosted Jupyter notebooks instance. Notebooks are frequently used to create tutorials and documentation for Wikimedia technology.
• Phabricator - Phabricator is a collaboration tool that is used by the Wikimedia technical community for task and bug management. You can find many issues and software projects documented here. Use best practices for software documentation when filing tasks and interacting in this space.

Autogenerated documentation

Some documentation is autogenerated.

• doc.wikimedia.org - An autogenerated list of documentation for Wikimedia projects.

Get started

New to technical documentation on Wikimedia projects? This page will help you get started right away.