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[Hackathon 2024] Improve technical documentation of tools
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Description

For the 2024 Hackathon, @JorisDarlingtonQuarshie and @TBurmeister want to make it easy for tool developers and technical contributors to improve tool documentation. To facilitate that, we're working on the following coordination tasks:

For practical reasons, we're limiting the scope of this to active tools available on Toolforge, with preference for community-maintained tools. And we're focusing only on technical documentation -- not tool user documentation. If you know of actively-maintained or still-functional tools that could benefit from improved technical documentation, you can contribute to preparing this hackathon project by filing phabricator tasks and tagging them as described above. If I have tagged a task that you think doesn't meet our criteria, or you want it removed for any reason, please remove the tasks. Thanks!

Event Timeline

TBurmeister changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Feb 20 2024, 7:02 PM
TBurmeister triaged this task as Medium priority.
TBurmeister updated the task description. (Show Details)
TBurmeister updated the task description. (Show Details)
TBurmeister moved this task from Backlog to In progress on the Tech-Docs-Team board.
TBurmeister added a project: Documentation.
TBurmeister moved this task from Backlog to Hacking projects on the Wikimedia-Hackathon-2024 board.

Status update:
I've been working on a draft of some tool-specific documentation guidelines:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TBurmeister_(WMF)/Sandbox/Tool_docs

When I finish this page, I plan to publish it as a subpage of the "Documentation Toolkit", and I will link to it from our Hackathon project page and from other relevant places, like the Toolforge best practices page.

Draft of Tool Docs guide is now ready finalized at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation/Tool_docs. I welcome any edits and feedback on it (feel free to use the Talk page or comment on this task).

Next steps:

  • Reach out to tool maintainers whose tool docs I used as examples in the guide, to let them know their docs are being featured and make them aware of the Hackathon project.
  • Return to the task of curating a list of tools / tool docs that people can focus on contributing to during the Hackathon, and how best to provide this information. Phabricator tasks are the norm and have their benefits, but we could also consider curating a list in Toolhub.

Created a quick first draft of instructions for how to claim phab tasks and work on docs during the hackathon: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Doc_Your_Tool:_Creating_user-friendly_documentation/Instructions

Still TODO: add a process and explanation for how to expore tools in Toolhub, identify those that could use doc help, how to offer that help, etc.

Status update:

I've created a set of instructions for how to use Toolhub to find and review tool documentation, and then use the Tool Docs Guide to review and improve docs as part of this Hackathon project: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Doc_Your_Tool:_Creating_user-friendly_documentation/Instructions

This is currently marked as {{draft}} pending review by @JorisDarlingtonQuarshie.