The Engineering Community team at the Wikimedia Foundation has opened a position for a

Technical Writer - Contract - 3 Months (+)

The description is copied below. Technical writers with a contribution history at mediawiki.org or other MediaWiki-based sites will be especially considered. If you are interested, please apply using this web form:

http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?aj=oMK5Xfwi&s=Community

Wikimedia's Engineering Community team is responsible for developing clear documentation for MediaWiki. All of our documentation is written collaboratively in wiki pages, involving all kinds of profiles, from WMF professional developers to anonymous users. There are some areas of our documentation that lack content or are outdated, while others have grown organically and they need pruning and polishing. It is complex to recruit volunteers for this type of work.

Scope of Work The technical writer will report to Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator. The main area of focus will be system architecture documentation, though we may identify other related areas during the course of the contract. Our main technical documentation exists on https://www.mediawiki.org and https://wikitech.wikimedia.org. Ideally, this person will start immediately, and should start no later than December 1, 2013. The technical writer will attend the MediaWiki Architecture Summit on January 23-24 in San Francisco, where s/he will be in charge of consolidating the meeting notes taken and polishing the related documentation. This is the only on-site task planned. The technical writer can be in any location during the rest of the contract period as long as it has good Internet connectivity. We can offer an on-site location in our offices in San Francisco, although this contract does not include any relocation or visa support.

Outcome and Performance Standards This work requires familiarity with wiki syntax and collaborative workflows. The technical writer will be improving actual pages edit by edit, with the possibility to find other edits being published by other contributors as well as related discussions where s/he is supposed to engage and respond. Quim Gil and other Engineering Community team members will monitor regularly the work and will assist with the community dialog if needed. The technical writer will have a backlog of areas to work on, agreed with the EC team. There will be weekly reviews or a similar procedure to review and sign off the tasks completed.

Qualifications: 3 years of professional experience writing technical documentation Experience volunteering in one or more free software projects as a documentation writer is highly valuable. (Please provide links to your user profile and main works.) Knowledge of PHP / JavaScript (even better when supported with pet projects, open source contributions or certified training)