Documentation/Contribute/New technical writers

Overview

MediaWiki's documentation is a significant resource for a lot of developers and software users. It relies on its contributors for constant improvement and update.

This page contains some useful information for new technical writers to get started.

Basics

1. Sign up for a Wikimedia account.
2. Learn to create and edit Mediawiki pages (Wikis). Wikis can be edited using the source or visual editor. Wiki markup is used for formatting the text.
   See Help:Contents.
3. Search and navigate Mediawiki pages effectively. Checkout Special:AllPages and Namespaces.
4. Learn to use templates.
5. Go through the Wikimedia Documentation Style Guide.
6. Familiarize yourself with the task tracking tool Phabricator and code repository Gerrit. Also see, Set up your development environment and check the communication tips and recommendations.
7. For discussions, join IRC and mailing lists.

Contributing

• Edit pages on the go. You might come across outdated, missing or incorrect content when you refer to certain pages. Make changes to the docs, file a bug report or create a new task in Phabricator. Note to discuss the issue on the talk page and understand the task creation terms on Phabricator before proceeding. See Technical documentation prioritization.
• Work on a documentation task. The tasks tagged as good first tasks are beginner friendly. (See the Phabricator help if you have not used the task tracker before.)
• Write new documentation, new templates, READMEs, etc. See Technical documentation templates and suggestions.
• Translate a page.

Suggestions for new writers

• Developer documentation is your primary reference; IRC, mailing lists, source code, etc., are secondary.
• Use the search bar in the top right for mediawiki.org specific search results. See Help:CirrusSearch for advanced search parameters.
  • If you prefer internet search engines, then some of them allow to restrict results to a website (e.g. add site:mediawiki.org to the search parameters).
• Before making major edits or starting a new page, you can create a page in your Sandbox. Replace username with your Wikimedia username and pagename with the name of the page you want to create at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:username/Sandbox/pagename.

Resources

• Documentation - An overview of technical documentation.
• Manual:FAQ - Frequently asked question about MediaWiki.
• New Developers - A guide for new Wikimedia developers.
• Developer hub - An overview of MediaWiki development.
• A beginner’s guide to writing documentation