Hi All,
We are happy to announce the launch of the Wikimedia Developer Portal - a centralized entry point for finding technical documentation and community resources across Wikimedia’s key technical areas.
The Developer Portal project is part of a broader initiative to improve the discoverability and overall quality of key technical documentation. Work on this project began in July 2020 and included research and feedback rounds, designing a content strategy and user journeys to help people navigate and achieve their tasks, technical implementation of the portal, developing a documentation review process, and updating key documents.
Wikimedia’s technical documentation spans a wide range of technologies, is distributed (and often duplicated) across mediawiki, wikitech, code repositories or other places, might or might not be up-to-date, and serves multiple audiences.
This complex landscape can make it hard to find the information you need. The goal of the Developer Portal is to make it easier for developers and other technical contributors to:
Find the key documentation they need for common developer tasks.
Discover available tools and technologies.
Learn how to get started in Wikimedia technical areas.
At its core, the Developer Portal is a navigation tool. It is an index of categorized links to key sources of technical information. These sources are hosted primarily on wikis—the portal itself contains no actual documentation.
A major part of this project includes reviewing and updating the documents linked from the Developer Portal - the actual documentation (examples: Localisation, Communication, Cloud Services introduction). This work will continue over the next year while also investigating how to improve and scale the process.
The Developer Portal is a project by the Developer Advocacy team within the Technical Engagement group at the Wikimedia Foundation and has been developed by a project team of technical writers, engineers, and developer advocates (Alex, Andre, Bryan, Sarah R, Tricia).
The long term goal is to step-by-step move towards a future where Wikimedia’s technical documentation is discoverable, accurate, standardized, and continuously updated. Yes, this is big :-) — and yes, it will take a while. Hope you join us in realizing this collective effort of making it easier for people to contribute to the code and technical spaces.
Thank you <3
This project would not have been possible without the support, knowledge, ideas and feedback of many! A huge thanks to:
the members of WMF and WMDE engineering teams who participated in exploratory interviews early in the process,
everyone who provided feedback at Hackathon 2021 & 2022, via private messages, on the Project page or gave input or help on Phabricator tasks
Developers and community members who participated in multiple rounds of user testing
the Design Strategy team at the Foundation for helping us with designing a research study and recruiting a diverse group of users to test the final version of the site
people who helped with key doc improvements and content reviews: Haley, Kamil, Komla, Nick, Srishti
translators and translatewiki.net community, especially Abijeet, Niklas, and Verdy_p
People who helped us with steps towards production and deployment: Alexandros, Andrew, Brian, Ryan, Valentin
We hope that this new resource will be fun to explore and ultimately be useful for your work.
If you are interested in learning more about the thinking behind the user journey design for the Developer Portal, please see the blog post on Diff. For more information about the technical implementation and design principles, please see the corresponding post on the techblog. All key information is also available on the project page of the Developer Portal.
Feedback, ideas and questions are more than welcome on the talk page of the project. Let's keep discussions in one place. :-)
Birgit & the Developer Portal project team