I'm Waldir Pimenta (User:Waldyrious, formerly User:Waldir) and I'm applying to participate in Wikimedia's project Complete migration of MediaWiki documentation in the 2024 edition of the Google Season of Docs program.
I have been a Wikimedian since 2005, and have both contributed software patches to the MediaWiki core repository, and authored/edited written content in the MediaWiki documentation. MediaWiki.org is my fifth most-edited wiki, with over two thousand edits so far. I am a trusted member of the technical community, having been granted administrator role in mediawiki.org, and I regularly participate in the Wikimedia Hackathons since 2012.
I've been interested in MediaWiki documentation for many years now, and have even planned major content reorganization efforts, as can be seen in User:Waldyrious/Docs. I haven't worked specifically in the content migration from Meta, but I did collect notes about that in User:Waldyrious/meta2mw, back in 2012 — in fact, those notes were originally a major focus of my plans for the MediaWiki documentation, and the largest section of main user page. I also have worked as a software engineer in the past, and now as a technical writer, so I believe it's fair to say that I have the skills, the contextual knowledge, and the personal interest to pursue this project successfully.
I am currently employed full-time as a technical writer, so my availability would be limited to 4–6 hours per week. That said, I am confident that with my existing experience, specific knowledge of the project domain, and ability to work autonomously as well as coordinating with the project mentors, it is possible to complete the project well within the GSoD timeline.
My preliminary plans for the work are:
- Communicating with the project's mentors and other relevant community members to establish expectations and sketch an initial work plan and timeline
- Assessing in more detail the scope of the content covered by the project: which pages to migrate, the depth of their content, any existing translations, and their currentness.
- Preparing mechanisms to track the progress of the migration (e.g. Phabricator tasks, a workboard, a tracking spreadsheet, etc.)
- Reviewing existing tasks, discussions and project pages (e.g. T181380, Project:MediaWiki documentation on Meta-Wiki) to collect additional context or subtasks
- Actually migrating the content, with the appropriate rewriting/updating/reorganization
- If appropriate, use MediaWiki's export/import feature to directly move any content that has compatible licensing (or isn't complex enough to warrant licensing concerns), as a way to preserve the page history
- Marking the migrated pages on Meta with banners indicating their historical status and pointing to the new location at mediawiki.org
- If time permits: Fixing any links to the old pages to point to the new locations
- Announcing the outcome to the Wikimedia technical community in the appropriate venues (Diff blog, mailing lists, Tech News, etc.)
For this work, I propose a budget of $8,000.