On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 4:20 PM, Aaron Halfaker <ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: A documentation SIG is not really Wikimedia-specific though (or did you mean "ORES documentation SIG" specifically?). Also, most Wikimedia-specific technology initiatives are on mw.org (all the Audiences projects, for example). Wikitech was originally a place for ops documentation. (It has its own infrastructure and deploy cadence, so it's unaffected by most failures; also it's small enough for static HTML dumps. When the site is down and you are scrambling to bring it back, it's a good thing when your operations docs aren't also down.) Later Labs needed a management interface which got tucked onto Wikitech (this was one of those "do everything inside MediaWiki" eras), so it made sense to put all Labs-related documentation on wikitech as well. Most other things are on mediawiki.org. There were various proposals over the years to change that (move wikitech content to mediawiki.org, move all WMF stuff to wikitech, move all WMF stuff to meta, move all non-MediaWiki-documentation stuff to a new developer wiki etc.) but none of them gained much momentum. Due to being managed differently, wikitech is not a great work environment IMO. There is no unified login, no page translation support, no structured discussion support, no pageview metrics, the registration process is tied to creating LDAP and shell accounts... There are plans to improve this eventually [1], but between that and the audience differences, I'd stay away for now. Btw you are probably aware of the past discussion on a documentation SIG, but just in case: [2] [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123425 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T156301

(dropped ai@ from the CC) On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 6:49 PM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Sarah is working on technical writing projects related specifically to ORES and Cloud Services this quarter (and hopefully for many more quarters to come). This work is part of the "technical community building" program from the Technology department's annual plan [0]. Sarah can jump in to say more, but my understanding is that the initial work of the SIGDOCS is intended to be focused pretty narrowly on ORES, Cloud VPS, and Toolforge. That certainly does not mean that we do not have other documentation gaps (we do) or that others are barred from organizing to work on things like MediaWiki API docs (they are not). It does mean however that we are making choices about focus with the hope that this will help make more actionable plans about which docs to work on first and what sort of work to do. Where the tracking page for SIGDOCS lives is probably the least important issue related to organizing the group, but I think your point is well taken. All of this is true, but then also very false when you learn that improving the Cloud VPS and Toolforge docs is at least 50% of the project to be undertaken. I'd like to second Gergo's initial enthusiasm about Sarah stepping up to help organize work on documentation. She has a great background in technical writing as individual contributor and experience in teaching writing related topics that I hope we can all leverage to get better at the craft of making clear and useful documentation. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/… Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Manager, Cloud Services Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855