Hey HN, a friend of mine is a budding technical writer, and is trying to get some actual documentation experience under her belt. Anyone have a project they could use some docs for?
If the goal is to gain more experience your friend should look for projects that appeal to them or are in an area they wish to gain experience in. For example, if they want to do code-level work, find a dev library - if they want to do user-level work find that. Also, some of the more established doc projects might be better to learn from than a project that has no docs - like the gnome docs team, etc.
From what I've seen from the Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women, the GNOME project does a good job of mentoring new volunteers. I think there is a real need for technical writes to improve their various guides.
I'm not affiliated with the project, but I've used openFrameworks (http://www.openframeworks.cc/) and really liked the library but found the documentation is pretty lacking. It's basically just an API reference and a few small programming guides. Even as an experienced developer I still found myself stumbling over how basic things worked because the documentation didn't really give any guidance.
Another vote for this, at first Angular seems to have a lot of documentation, but when you try and use it, you find most of it is out of date, or no longer 'the angular way'
The docs are way, way better than a year or so ago, but I agree, they always need improvement.
The only thing that may hold back some people is that the documentation is generated from the source with doc comments rather than being in separate files.
The manpages for GNU utilities are usually stubs that essentially say:
The full documentation for XY is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If
the info and XY programs are properly installed at your site, the command
info coreutils 'XY invocation'
should give you access to the complete manual.
(This is, btw, one of the best reasons to love the BSDs.)
This wouldn't exactly be a great training project for a technical writer since the content is essentially there and would need to be transformed into decent manpages. This is, however, an open source project that could use documentation help, and one with unmatched popularity, so this might be interesting for someone else who would like to acquire experience with open source documentation while doing something that lots of sysadmins will appreciate.
In particular I think the official Posix manpages are available under a free license, which should be the basis for the portable parts, with the Linux parts being extras.
We're always looking for someone to help improve our documentation over at Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/).
As our support for third-party extensions grows, we're especially interested in writing a series of guides to help extension authors, as well as those using our API to do interesting things.
The git man pages are a mess. And not easy to fix. But it is a much needed task.
One of the challenges is that the pages are constructed from from multiple files as an attempt to factor out the documentation of switches that are common to multiple git commands, but I think this makes a lot of the pages harder to read. I'd rather the man page for git log (say) document just its unique options and then at the end say "git log also accepts any of the rev-list options...see it for details."
A great opportunity here is Bluebird, the JS promises library [0]. The current documentation is nice, but only covers the API itself, with very few use cases. A "getting started" guide is badly needed for newcomers to BB and promises in general. A well-written guide would be a great star on your friend's resume.
There are tons of use cases and recipes littered in the Github issues and StackOverflow answers that need to make it into the official docs. Really there should be examples for how to do anything that another http library like Requests documents how to do.
That said, I'd suggest your friend starts with a project she has an affinity for. Perhaps she has used it before, or plans to use it in the future.
The Perl 6 project is always happy about doc contributions. Currently we have a specification, which is aimed at compiler writers: http://perlcabal.org/syn/ and then the beginning of some user-facing documentation: http://doc.perl6.org/
"Translating" specification documentation into user-facing documentation would be very helpful. For questions, feedback and getting started, it's best to reach the community through IRC: http://perl6.org/community/irc
45 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 97.8 ms ] threadI'm sure there's other parts that needs to be updated.
This is the collaborative bible for web developers, think of it as a wikipedia for the web apis.
(edit : I'm saying that in case you or your friend does not know that already)
There's also yunohost here : https://yunohost.org that would need some documentation.
Some suggestions: * Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Getting_started Shoot them a mail and they can probably connect her with a project to work on. MDN in particular can always use someone to browse through the contributions and correct/improve them. They'll even connect you with a mentor to get you started if you ask!
* Open Hatch. http://openhatch.org/search/?q=&contribution_type=documentat... I've tried to use this site in the past, it's a little rough around the edges but if you're looking for single bite-sized tasks you may find them here.
Other than that, try browsing Github issue lists and seeing if there's anything that strikes your fancy?
https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/
Apache NLP which needs documentation https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project+%3D+OPENN...
UN Online Volunteering This is on the social contribution side ,may not be your choice , but its good to know. https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/vol/opportunity_search...
https://docs.angularjs.org/guide
https://docs.angularjs.org/api
A lot of smaller OSS without coporate backing really need better docs.
The only thing that may hold back some people is that the documentation is generated from the source with doc comments rather than being in separate files.
This wouldn't exactly be a great training project for a technical writer since the content is essentially there and would need to be transformed into decent manpages. This is, however, an open source project that could use documentation help, and one with unmatched popularity, so this might be interesting for someone else who would like to acquire experience with open source documentation while doing something that lots of sysadmins will appreciate.
BTW the coreutils man pages are a subset of the full manual, and I think that adding more information to man pages can make things harder to find.
The thinking at present is that linking directly to a web page for the full manual is what most users would prefer.
As our support for third-party extensions grows, we're especially interested in writing a series of guides to help extension authors, as well as those using our API to do interesting things.
http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
There is just an endless list of features, and no clear red thread as to what you actually need to get going.
It's hard because it just supports everything for some reason.
https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/December...
One of the challenges is that the pages are constructed from from multiple files as an attempt to factor out the documentation of switches that are common to multiple git commands, but I think this makes a lot of the pages harder to read. I'd rather the man page for git log (say) document just its unique options and then at the end say "git log also accepts any of the rev-list options...see it for details."
I'm willing to help you learn the framework so you can write the docs.
[0] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird
https://github.com/shazow/urllib3 -> https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/
There are tons of use cases and recipes littered in the Github issues and StackOverflow answers that need to make it into the official docs. Really there should be examples for how to do anything that another http library like Requests documents how to do.
That said, I'd suggest your friend starts with a project she has an affinity for. Perhaps she has used it before, or plans to use it in the future.
"Translating" specification documentation into user-facing documentation would be very helpful. For questions, feedback and getting started, it's best to reach the community through IRC: http://perl6.org/community/irc