Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team - MediaWiki
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Wikimedia Technical Documentation
Empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain.
Group:
Technology
Developer Experience
Start:
2023-06-01
Team members:
see
#Team members
Backlog:
#Tech-Docs-Team
Management:
Sean Long
For information about how to find and create technical documentation, see:
Documentation
This page documents the work and processes of the
Wikimedia Foundation Technical Documentation Team
(Tech Docs Team).
Mission
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Our mission is to empower people to use and contribute to Wikimedia technology by making technical documentation easy to find, use, create, and maintain.
The document or site works when target users can find what they need, understand what they find, and act on it confidently.
—"Five Steps to Plain Language",
centerforplainlanguage.org
Open-source software is an essential part of the Wikimedia movement. It provides platforms for content, enables us to expand our reach, and encourages us to look at knowledge is new ways. Documentation is the method through which software can be shared, and built collaboratively
. Our mission is to ensure that everyone who wants to use or contribute to Wikimedia software can easily find and use the information they need. This work builds on over 20 years of technical documentation by the Wikimedia technical community. It strives to make technical information more accessible, more inclusive, and more reliable so that open-source software can continue to empower the Wikimedia mission.
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Leave a comment on
Talk:Documentation
or
Talk:Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
Tag a
Phabricator
task with
#Tech-Docs-Team
. You can use this tag to request a consultation (
template
) or review (
template
) from our team for a documentation project you're working on.
Email us at techdocs@wikimedia.org
Talk to us in the
#wikimedia-techdocs
connect
channel on
libera.chat
Goals
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Drive documentation work with data
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Documentation success is notoriously difficult to measure. However, in order to prioritize our work and create a shared understanding of documentation quality, we must establish metrics, based on quantitative and qualitative methods, for measuring documentation health and tracking improvements.
Documentation effectively meets users’ information needs
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Better understanding the health of our technical documentation across technical areas enables us to identify where the need for improvement – and potential for impact – is greatest. Technical writers provide documentation strategy to support critical user journeys across products and projects. Our holistic view of Wikimedia technical content helps us create and structure content for multiple, overlapping audiences. As partners in development workflows, technical writers provide a crucial user-focused perspective, helping improve our technology so that it needs less documentation.
Build the culture of documentation
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The Wikimedia technical ecosystem spans hundreds of services, extensions, libraries, and tools, created by both staff and volunteers. To effectively manage technical documentation at this scale, we must empower Wikimedians across the movement to create and manage docs. This requires community outreach, self-service tools, and processes that support (and require) documentation updates. We must also invest in automated tools, like CI-based documentation checks and content linters, to make it easier for everyone to participate in maintaining great docs.
Active projects
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For more details, read our updates on
Talk:Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
, and visit our
workboard on Phabricator
Project
Annual plan alignment
Contact
Status
Productionalize API spec linting
WE5.2
KBach
In progress
API Portal shutdown
WE5.2
APaskulin
In progress
Past projects
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Implement API documentation patterns
(completed April 2026)
Unified changelog for Wikimedia APIs
(completed March 2026)
Lift Wing API documentation
(completed March 2026)
Security
and
authentication extension
documentation (completed March 2026)
Two-factor authentication (2FA) documentation
(completed February 2026)
Improve API changelog style guide
(completed January 2026)
Standard API documentation patterns
(completed September 2025)
API docs research and discovery
(completed September 2025)
Test plan documentation
(completed September 2025)
Tech docs outreach and education
(completed July 2025)
Update documentation for working with translated pages on wiki
(completed June 2025)
Build linting tools for technical documentation
(completed June 2025)
Technical documentation metrics research, design, and implementation
(completed March 2025)
Redesign documentation for MediaWiki interfaces
(completed March 2025)
Improve readability of popular documentation pages on mobile
(completed February 2025)
Community outreach initiatives
(completed December 2024)
Google Season of Docs 2024
(completed November 2024)
Replace jsduck with JSDoc across all Wikimedia code bases
(completed November 2024)
Documentation tools and processes research
(completed November 2024)
Metrics Platform documentation
(completed November 2024)
Improve requestctl tool documentation and DDoS runbook
(completed October 2024)
Documentation metrics dashboard
(completed July 2024)
AQS 2.0 user documentation
(completed July 2024)
Redesign Data Platform docs on Wikitech
(completed June 2024)
Consolidate and improve data usage docs
(completed June 2024)
Tool documentation hackathon project
(completed May 2024)
Deployment pipeline documentation improvements
(completed March 2024)
MediaWiki quickstart workflow for contributors
(completed January 2024)
Conceptual framework for landing pages
(completed September 2023)
Cloud services collection update
(completed September 2023)
Pywikibot collection update
(completed September 2023)
Initial buildout of team practices
(completed August 2023)
Pywikibot workshop materials
(completed July 2023)
Maintenance projects
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We maintain the following projects that align with our team goals. Maintenance responsibilities include reviewing patch requests, fixing critical bugs, monitoring wiki pages, and monitoring Phabricator projects.
Wikimedia Developer Portal
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The
Developer Portal
is a static website that helps people find Wikimedia technical documentation. For more information, see the
project documentation
Documentation resources on mediawiki.org
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Documentation
and its subpages provide resources to help you find technical documentation, improve your docs or your writing, and get involved in contributing to Wikimedia technical documentation efforts.
API Portal
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(Beta) The
API Portal
is an experimental API documentation and OAuth credential management wiki, including a wiki instance at
api.wikimedia.org
, a
skin
, and an
extension
API spec reader
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The
API spec reader
is a tool that renders
OpenAPI specifications
with a built-in sandbox. For more information, see the
project documentation
MediaWiki Action API demos and app gallery
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The
mediawiki-api-demos repository
contains sample apps for MediaWiki Action API tutorials, sample code for MediaWiki Action API docs, and code for the
MediaWiki Apps Gallery
doc.wikimedia.org
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doc.wikimedia.org
is a platform for Wikimedia technical documentation, including static sites and generated docs. We lead the documentation strategy for the platform.
JSDoc WMF theme
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In partnership with WMF frontend teams, we co-maintain the Wikimedia
theme
for generated JavaScript documentation on doc.wikimedia.org, including leading documentation strategy, triaging and implementing minor fixes and enhancements, and releasing new versions.
Technical documentation tools
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Technical documentation dashboard:
The
technical documentation dashboard
is a Toolforge tool that aggregates metrics about collections of documentation pages on wiki. See
phab:T334839
and
Documentation/Tools/Documentation_metrics_dashboard
Documentation linting tools:
A set of experimental tools used to analyze technical documentation and generate feedback on how to improve it. See
Documentation/Tools/Linting
and
phab:T388109
Doc metrics generator:
An experimental tool that generates high-level doc metrics for pages on mediawiki.org. See
Documentation/Tools/Metrics_generator
Team members
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Person
Timezone
Location
Developer account
IRC
Phabricator
Gerrit
GitLab
Alexandra Paskulin
UTC-8/-7
California, USA
apaskulin
apaskulin
apaskulin
Alex Paskulin
apaskulin
Tricia Burmeister
UTC-5/-4
Pennsylvania, USA
tburmeister
tburmeister
TBurmeister
Triciaburmeister
tburmeister
Kamil Bach
UTC+1/+2
Belgium
kbach
kbch
KBach
KBach
kbach
References
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"Documentation orients newcomers to open-source projects, helps them overcome technical and process barriers, and increases their self-efficacy". Balali, S., Steinmacher, I., Annamalai, U.
et al.
Newcomers’ Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors’ and Newcomers’ Barriers in OSS Projects.
Comput Supported Coop Work
27
, 679–714 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9310-8
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