Feb 082011
 

Today we’re announcing a new documentation initiative, called Wiki Wednesdays. The idea is that each week, we’ll post a list of three or so articles that are in need of technical help from each of our key documentation areas. For the documentation nerds among us (hello, my brothers and sisters!), these are articles tagged with any combination of these tags:

  • NeedsContent. These articles are missing information and need details added in order to make them useful.
  • NeedsExample. These articles need examples added.
  • NeedsTechnicalReview. These articles need an expert to look them over and make sure they’re technically accurate.

These are intersected with the tags corresponding to our key documentation areas, then a random selection of up to three articles from that set are picked each Wiki Wednesday. We’ll then post those lists on the appropriate newsgroups, as well as on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

If you’re interested in how the lists are generated, take a look at the NeedWorkForTag template I wrote on MDC; this does all the heavy lifting. It accepts as parameters a tag for which to generate the list and the number of items to select (as well as an optional third parameter indicating whether to generate a list ready for posting to mailing lists or a pretty list for using on the web).

The script takes a while to run for all the tags I’m generating lists for (as much as 30 seconds!), and hits the database pretty hard, generating many thousands of database queries. But it should only be run rarely, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Hopefully this initiative will help get more technical folks to pitch in on documentation — at least with emailed notes and feedback; notes can be emailed to mdnwiki@mozilla.org.

 Posted by at 2:08 PM

  4 Responses to “About Wiki Wednesdays”

  1. My documentation time is spent cleaning up another wiki, but I’d like to say that the Acid series of browser tests need documentation.

  2. I’m not sure those really qualify as the type of stuff we would document on devmo. :)

  3. Developers care about what browsers pass what tests and if they fail them, why. As such, things like the acid series of tests seem to be something that should be documented at devmo, if you want to have a one-stop place for looking these things up.

  4. Well, given that Mozilla’s official stance is that Acid3 is not a good test of web browsers, it’s unlikely we’ll put any effort into writing anything about it.
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