Season of Docs/Administrators/Organizational application (2019)

Overview

This is the information we used as part of our organizational application with Google.

Links

1. Twitter URL (optional) - https://twitter.com/Wikimedia
2. Blog URL (optional) - https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/

Initial organization questions and answers

Previous experience with technical writers or documentation

Our organization's participating administrators both have prior experience working with technical writers and documentations. Both of this year's administrators are located on the Developer Advocacy team and work to help improve on-boarding and system documentation for technical collaborators at different skill levels. The main administrator is a technical writer who has over a decade of experience working in tech. She is a former writing instructor and has worked with student writers, clients, and organizations to enhance skills and produce quality technical documentation and communication. The second administrator is an experienced developer advocate who works directly with technical contributors. In this role, she works to improve technical documentation across our projects in order to improve the experience of technical contributors. She has served as a mentor, working directly with volunteer technical writers on Wikimedia's projects.

Previous experience with similar programs, such as Google Summer of Code or others

In the past, our organization has participated in Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and Outreachy. The last and current rounds of Outreachy have been focused specifically on improving technical documentation for the MediaWiki Action API. We have plenty of experience working with contributors, students, and interns on technical documentation related projects.

Accepting the Season of Docs stipend

Yes. We will be looking into this.

Organization profile

Public profile

1. Name - Wikimedia Foundation
2. Website URL - http://wikimediafoundation.org/
3. Tagline - Global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world
4. Logo - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brand
5. Primary Open Source License - GPL 2.0
6. Organization Category - Web
7. Technology Tags - PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python
8. Topic Tags - Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, Semantic Web, Documentation

Descriptions

1. Short Description - Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world through its various projects, local chapters, and support structures.
2. Long Description - Wikimedia envisions a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. It spans various projects, local chapters and support structures of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. There are 13 projects that Wikimedia officially supports including Wikipedia, a fifth most popular site on the internet and a well known free knowledge project in the world. Wikipedia is used by more than 400 million people every month in over 300 languages. Some of Wikipedia's sister projects are Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, MediaWiki, Wikivoyage, etc. All major projects of Wikimedia are collaboratively developed by users around the world using the MediaWiki software. There is much more to do that you can help Wikimedia achieve: stabilize infrastructure, increase participation, improve quality, increase reach and foster innovation. Read more about Wikimedia on our homepage.

Proposals

1. Application Instructions -
2. Proposal Tags - outreach-programs-projects

Organization application

Why does your org want to participate in Google Season of Docs?

Wikipedia is well known as an encyclopedia, but Wikimedia is less known as a free software project. Through outreach programs like GSoD, we attract new contributors, and individuals interested in many different aspects of producing software. It is a great opportunity for us to concentrate on technical documentation, which is often overlooked during and after the software development process. For participating writers, this is an opportunity to work on real-world projects, build a visible portfolio, and help them grow professionally. Our participation in GSoD will help us to better undestand how potential contributors are experience our technical documentation and how to improvie it in ways that help scale support and enhance user experiences. Our mentors gain good experience, karma, and have some fun! All this brings meaningful impact to our community.

How many potential technical writers will you mentor this year?

1

How will you keep technical writers engaged

One of our requirements for a project to get featured in GSoD is to have two mentors, with at least one of them with prior experience. All our mentors use various communication mediums for weekly check-ins and project-related discussions with writers. Zulip is our main communication channel. We monitor it throughout the week.

How will you help technical writers stay on schedule?

Mentors and technical writers will work together to scope GSOD projects that are challenging but can be reasonably completed during the time frame. Together, they will create specifications, agree on milestones, and outcomes and communicate regularly throughout GSOD to ensure projects are running on schedule. We encourage students and mentors to avoid working in isolation and push for all project management in Phabricator (a task management tool we use at Wikimedia). We also require bi-weekly reports that help organization administrators learn about student's progress.

How will you keep technical writers involved with your community after GSoD?

We will encourage ongoing relationships between mentors, technical writers, and the community, which will go beyond the timeline of the program. We hope that technical writers will be encouraged by the positive interactions and practical experience they build and will continue to participate in ours and other FOSS projects. We will try to invite former GSoD students to participate as mentors or administrators in the future rounds of GSoD, encourage them to take part in our international community events such as the developer summit, hackathon, etc. and promote some of the success stories and blog posts around in our community.

Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org before?

Yes. We have participated in Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in, Outreachy and other outreach programs.

What year was your project started?

2001

Where does your source code live?

Most of our source code lives on Wikimedia Gerrit which is being mirrored to Github and also, some code repositories live on Github too.