Technical documentation checklist and templates

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Overview

This page contains a checklist for individuals who are writing technical documentation on Wikitech -- primarily Cloud VPS and Toolforge.

Before you begin

Useful resources

Technical documentation checklist

At minimum, each documentation page for Cloud VPS and Toolforge should include:

  1. Descriptive Title: The title should be descriptive and specific. This helps visitors decide whether they would want to use the page. For example: Accessing Instances on Cloud VPS is much better than Instances.
  2. Project or page-specific templates:
    1. Cloud VPS Navbox: {{Cloud VPS nav}}
    2. Toolforge Navbox: {{Template:Toolforge nav}}
    3. Contact Us / Communication: {{:Help:Cloud Services communication}}
  3. An Overview: This is a short statement about the document, who it is for, why it is useful.
  4. Prerequisites or Before you Begin: This is a checklist of what a person will need in order to follow the documentation. This may include the type of account people will need, software, rights, knowledge level, etc. You may want to link to information (for example, how to obtain user roles, rights, etc).
  5. Descriptive section headers: Section headers should be descriptive and specific. This helps visitors decide if they need to read the entire page or just a section. Think about the most important information that the section will convey. Make sure that this is the header.
  6. See Also:
  7. Categories: For Toolforge or Cloud VPS, Categories: Category:Cloud VPS, Category:Toolforge, Category:Administration or Category:Administrator (for Admin pages), Category:Documentation, Category:Cloud Services

Documentation templates

Page templates

Formatting and content templates

Wikitech has various technical document markup templates to format your text, add callouts, and markup your content.

Technical documentation review

It can be helpful for new and updated technical documentation to go through a technical review.

  1. Create a Phabricator task with the following: Technical Review for: link to page
  2. Tags: Cloud VPS or Toolforge and Documentation
  3. Subscribers: Yourself and others who may be able to review
  4. Description: "link to page" has been recently created or updated. It requires a technical review for accuracy. Is there any outdated, wrong, or missing information?"
  5. You may want to link the ticket from the page you that needs review. Make sure to subscribe and follow-up to changes in a timely manner.

Communication and support

Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia Movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:

Discuss and receive general support
Receive mail announcements about critical changes
Subscribe to the cloud-announce@ mailing list (all messages are also mirrored to the cloud@ list)
Track work tasks and report bugs
Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself
Learn about major near-term plans
Read the News wiki page
Read news and stories about Wikimedia Cloud Services
Read the Cloud Services Blog (for the broader Wikimedia movement, see the Wikimedia Technical Blog)
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