Hello Alexandra Paskulin and team MediaWiki,

My name is Mehak Saeed and I'm writing this to express my interest in MediaWiki's project: Consolidate MediaWiki Help Documentation - The Wikimedia Foundation. Please find my statement of interest below.

Statement of Interest

Personal Information

• Name: Mehak Saeed. You can call me Mehak, pronounced as Mae-hayk.
• Email: mehak.saeed151@gmail.com
• Timezone: GMT+5
• Availability: 40hrs/week
• Resume
• GitHub

Professional Information

Overview of My Recent Technical Writing Experience

My Technical Writing Experience

I'm a professional technical writer with 7.5 years of experience and someone who believes in the power of content to make a difference. I believe that your product is only as good as the user who uses it. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to educate the end users so they can use the product to its full capacity and make the most out of it. I'm very process-oriented and I like to keep things organized.

• I have worked on the technical documentation of 30+ products
• List of documents I have worked on:
  • User guide
  • API guide (Swagger: YAML + JSON & Postman)
  • Deployment guide
  • Architecture guide
  • Onboarding guides
  • Troubleshooting guide
  • Release notes
  • Product architecture and tech diagrams
  • Knowledgebase articles
• Target audience I have written documents for:
  • Developers
  • End users
  • Admins
  • Integrators
  • Contributors
  • Network engineers
  • Operators

Open-source Documentation Experience

As a part of Google Season of Docs, I was shortlisted as a technical writer both in 2022 and 2023. Both the projects that I worked on required auditing the existing content, noting down the friction points, improving the docs, reorganizing it and publishing it for better user discoverability. Please find the case study links for both projects below:

• My GSoD project for 2022: Published cert-manager case study - GSoD
• My GSoD project for 2023: Published Flux case study - GSoD

Writing Samples

Note: These GSoD and non-GSoD samples are shared keeping the project scope mentioned in the MediaWiki's GSoD page in mind.

Approach Used for GSoD in 2022 & 2023

a. cert-manager Documentation (My project for GSoD 2022)

• Format: Markdown
• Tool: GitHub
• Goal: Conduct a documentation audit and create a new outline for the docs to improve the navigation

b. Flux Documentation (My project for GSoD 2023)

• Format: Markdown
• Tool: GitHub
• Goal: Improve the Flux user onramp

c. I actively contribute to both cert-manager and Flux’s documentation reorganization. To get started, a concordance sheet for cert-manager and concordance sheet for Flux was created to identify user personas at a page level and come up with a plan for the structural changes.

d. A survey was conducted to collect feedback from the community members on slack. The restructuring plan was later based on the results obtained from the survey. Please visit this deck to view the summary of survey results.

e. To create an outline that ensures a user-friendly navigation experience, I worked on friction logs for cert-manager using the following two approaches:

• Approach 1: User experience-based friction logs
  • Make a list of the most common use cases.
  • Put yourself in the user's shoes and use the keywords that they might use to search for answers.
  • Perform a Google search for each use case using similar keywords a user might use.
  • Navigate through the search results and try to find the answers within the official documentation links provided.
  • Follow the published instructions for each use case.
  • Note down any gaps in the documentation in terms of the existence of those instructions and ease of finding them.
  • Identify any further gaps in the documentation that might make it difficult for the user to find the instructions they need.
    
    See Also: Check page 4 of this GSoD work document to view the friction logs jotted down for cert-manager.
• Approach 2: Data-based friction logs A very extensive issue analysis exercise was performed while working with cert-manager as a GSoD 2022 candidate in which I listed all the relevant issues raised in GitHub and on Slack so we could decide if and where to incorporate the frequently raised questions in the documentation.
  • Make a list of the most common use cases,
  • Put yourself in the user's shoes and use the keywords that they might use to search for answers.
  • Perform a Slack search for each keyword and note down the total count of matched results
  • Dissect the search results and perform level 2 grouping. For example, if the installation had 400 search results, then 150 of those results were related to installing xyz using method 1.
  • Try to find the answers within the official documentation.
  • Follow the published instructions for each use case.
  • Note down any gaps in the documentation in terms of the existence of those instructions and ease of finding them.
  • Identify any further gaps in the documentation that might make it difficult for the user to find the instructions they need.
    
    See Also: Check page 13 of this GSoD work document to view the friction logs jotted down for cert-manager.

Other Documentation Samples

Note: If needed, I’m happy to walk you through more product documentation samples and guides that I have worked on in the past.

Why Am I Interested in Open-source Projects?

I have massive respect for the amazing work open-source organizations do. I believe all these great open-source projects deserve good documentation to increase product adoption. I want to contribute my part in sharing the documentation-related workload with the team by addressing the open issues. The end goal is to include the frequently raised questions from the community chat within the documentation and to see a decrease in the number of PRs raised because of the availability of missing information. Doing so will allow the open-source teams to focus more on development while I take care of the documentation piece as the GSoD candidate.

Plan of Action for MediaWiki

Project 1: Complete migration of MediaWiki documentation

• Item 1: For pages listed under Project:MediaWiki_documentation_on_Meta-Wiki/List#Has_MediaWiki.org_equivalent, compare the Meta page with its MediaWiki.org equivalent, and add any missing information to the MediaWiki.org page.
  • Action Plan
    • Create a concordance sheet for tracking purposes
    • Compare content with strong attention to details.
      • Check 1: Use Diffchecker to compare content at a surface level
      • Check 2: Read through the content and compare on a conceptual level.
    • Identify and add any missing information

• Item 2: For pages listed under Project:MediaWiki_documentation_on_Meta-Wiki/List#No_MediaWiki.org_equivalent, create a MediaWiki.org page that covers the content on the Meta page.
  • Action Plan
    • Identify the ideal placement of the page
    • Create a new page and draft content
    • Validate the content

• Item 3: For pages listed under Project:MediaWiki_documentation_on_Meta-Wiki/List#Actually_WMF-specific, review the pages for usability, and design and implement an organization to make these pages easy to discover and maintain.
  • Action Plan
    • Identify the target audience
    • Conduct a thorough review of Mediawiki documentation's existing navigation and information architecture
    • Identify which content belongs to which stage of the users' adoption journey.
    • Identify the basic startup tasks to be completed by each user persona and make sure the updated structure reflects the logical sequence of docs to be followed by the user.

Post-Implementation Steps

• Schedule checkpoint calls with the team for feedback pre and post-implementation and to ensure that we are headed in the right direction.
• Encourage feedback from open-source contributors, developers, users, and the community members to identify any areas that need further improvement.
• Place relevant redirects, and perform link-checking to ensure that all links are functioning correctly

Expense

Considering the time and effort needed for this project, I'm willing to put in the work for a total cost of $12,000. That includes my time and dedication throughout the 22 to 30 weeks it will take to complete.

Next Steps

I feel very positive and confident about this project and I believe I can use my extensive writing experience to make it a success.

Let's hop on a quick call and see if there's an alignment between my expertise and your needs. Please pick a slot from my calendly link that works for you the best: Schedule a quick call

Thank you for taking out time to read about me. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Have a wonderful day ahead!

Best regards,
Mehak Saeed