Technical Document Re-working Group/Meetings/2019-02-08

Notes for February 8, 2019

Attendees: Nick, Bryan, Sarah R., Aaron

• Interesting new docs design variant seen at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blubber - I'm (NW) not sure what to think of endorsing/promoting this look. I appreciate the clarity, but I'm hesitant about the massive logo and the oversized intro text… Thoughts?
  • NW: "Does it scale?" is as ever my first thought. I don't think this does scale (i.e. reproducible in many other pages) which conflicts with "consistency". But maybe we just need a handful of "consistent with some other pages" design-variants to pick from, and this could be one of them?
• Results of the MediaWiki API Technical Documentation survey and next steps
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ff5rZCVagUHo8ujJdWGXTokJzPXt4prCHQvBW_nqEyM/edit#
  • Going up on Meta (URL) soon -- will take out personal email, etc.
  • Thinking about qualitative interviews (what to ask)
  • Thinking about demographics. We have information on a small section of experienced API users. If we change our scope (looking for new technical contributors) we will need to identify new types of collaborators and reach out to them to identify their needs
• Technical Engagement / Developer Advocacy -- What kind of technical documentation / documentation can we provide to help potential mentors onboard quickly and to make it easier for new contributors to collaborate
• Next focus area -- Toolforge documentation (starting with the Topviews analysis: https://tools.wmflabs.org/topviews/?project=wikitech.wikimedia.org&platform=all-access&date=2019-01&excludes=Server_admin_log)
  • My guess from pageviews so far is that the Portal Pages are being visited but not getting clickthroughs (as landing pages). If you look at the topviewed pages under the “wikimedia labs portal” -- these are not pages that link from wikimedia labs portal
    • NW: Can we get stats on where the Portal:Wikimedia_Labs entry-point people are coming from externally? I suspect it's just "wmflabs.org" which is why I put the new banner-box at the top of that page.
  • If only we could see our users journeys (how are they getting there, where they are landing, going to, duration of stay, return views, etc…)
  • [discussed putting note-boxes on the high-traffic pages to potentially interest newcomers. E.g "Newcomer? Here's a task you could work on [...]", "Open Jobs in SRE!" etc)