Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team

This page documents the work and processes of the Wikimedia Foundation Technical Documentation Team (Tech Docs Team).

Wikimedia Technical Documentation Empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain. Group: Technology → Developer Experience Start: 2023-06-01 Team members: see #Team members Management: Alexandra Paskulin

For information about how to find and create technical documentation, see: Documentation.

Mission

Our mission is to empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain.

The document or site works when target users can find what they need, understand what they find, and act on it confidently.

—"Five Steps to Plain Language", centerforplainlanguage.org

Open-source software is an essential part of the Wikimedia movement. It provides platforms for content, enables us to expand our reach, and encourages us to look at knowledge is new ways. Documentation is the method through which software can be shared and collaborated on. Our mission is to ensure that everyone who wants to use or contribute to Wikimedia software can easily find and use the information they need. This work builds on over 20 years of technical documentation by the Wikimedia technical community. It strives to make technical information more accessible, more inclusive, and more reliable so that open-source software can continue to empower the Wikimedia mission.

Contact us

• Leave a comment on Talk:Documentation or Talk:Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
• Tag a Phabricator task with #Tech-Docs-Team
• Email us at techdocs@wikimedia.org

Goals

Drive documentation work with data

Documentation success is notoriously difficult to measure. However, in order to prioritize our work and create a shared understanding of documentation quality, we must establish metrics, based on quantitative and qualitative methods, for measuring documentation health and tracking improvements.

Documentation effectively meets users’ information needs

Better understanding the health of our technical documentation across technical areas enables us to identify where the need for improvement – and potential for impact – is greatest. Technical writers provide documentation strategy to support critical user journeys across products and projects. Our holistic view of Wikimedia technical content helps us create and structure content for multiple, overlapping audiences. As partners in development workflows, technical writers provide a crucial user-focused perspective, helping improve our technology so that it needs less documentation.

Build the culture of documentation

The Wikimedia technical ecosystem spans hundreds of services, extensions, libraries, and tools, created by both staff and volunteers. To effectively manage technical documentation at this scale, we must empower Wikimedians across the movement to create and manage docs. This requires community outreach, self-service tools, and processes that support (and require) documentation updates. We must also invest in automated tools, like CI-based documentation checks and content linters, to make it easier for everyone to participate in maintaining great docs.

Active projects

For more details, read our twice-monthly updates on Talk:Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, and visit our workboard on Phabricator.

Project	Alignment	Contact	Status
Replace jsduck with JSDoc3 across all Wikimedia code bases	WMF essential work	APaskulin	In progress
Google Season of Docs 2024	WMF essential work	APaskulin	In progress
Documentation health metrics for MediaWiki	WE6.1	TBurmeister	In progress
Improve requestctl tool documentation and DDoS runbook	WE4.3	TBurmeister	In progress
Metrics Platform documentation	SDS2.1	APaskulin	In progress
Documentation tools and processes research	WMF essential work	KBach	In progress
Community outreach initiatives	WMF essential work	KBach	In progress

Past projects

• Pywikibot workshop materials (completed July 2023)
• Initial buildout of team practices (completed August 2023)
• Pywikibot collection update (completed September 2023)
• Cloud services collection update (completed September 2023)
• Conceptual framework for landing pages (completed September 2023)
• MediaWiki quickstart workflow for contributors (completed January 2024)
• Deployment pipeline documentation improvements (completed March 2024)
• Tool documentation hackathon project (completed May 2024)
• Consolidate and improve data usage docs (completed June 2024)
• Redesign Data Platform docs on Wikitech (completed June 2024)
• AQS 2.0 user documentation (completed July 2024)
• Documentation metrics dashboard (completed July 2024)

Maintenance projects

We maintain the following projects that align with our team goals. Maintenance responsibilities include reviewing patch requests, fixing critical bugs, monitoring wiki pages, and monitoring Phabricator projects.

Wikimedia Developer Portal

The Developer Portal is a static website that helps people find Wikimedia technical documentation. For more information, see the project documentation.

Documentation resources on mediawiki.org

Documentation and its subpages provide resources to help you find technical documentation, improve your docs or your writing, and get involved in contributing to Wikimedia technical documentation efforts.

API Portal

(Beta) The API Portal is an experimental API documentation and OAuth credential management wiki, including a wiki instance at api.wikimedia.org, a skin, and an extension.

API spec reader

The API spec reader is a tool that renders OpenAPI specifications with a built-in sandbox. For more information, see the project documentation.

MediaWiki Action API demos and app gallery

The mediawiki-api-demos repository contains sample apps for MediaWiki Action API tutorials, sample code for MediaWiki Action API docs, and code for the MediaWiki Apps Gallery.

doc.wikimedia.org

doc.wikimedia.org is a platform for Wikimedia technical documentation, including static sites and generated docs. We lead the documentation strategy for the platform.

JSDoc WMF theme

In partnership with WMF frontend teams, we co-maintain the Wikimedia theme for generated JavaScript documentation on doc.wikimedia.org, including leading documentation strategy, triaging and implementing minor fixes and enhancements, and releasing new versions.

Technical documentation dashboard

The technical documentation dashboard is a Toolforge tool that aggregates metrics about collections of documentation pages on wiki. See phab:T334839 and Documentation/Tools/Documentation_metrics_dashboard.

Team members

Person	Timezone	Location	Developer account	IRC	Phabricator	Gerrit	GitLab
Alexandra Paskulin (team lead)	UTC-8/-7	California, USA	apaskulin	apaskulin	apaskulin	Alex Paskulin	apaskulin
Tricia Burmeister	UTC-5/-4	Pennsylvania, USA	tburmeister	tburmeister	TBurmeister	Triciaburmeister	tburmeister
Kamil Bach	UTC+1/+2	Belgium	kbach	kbach	KBach	KBach	kbach