 Hi, everybody. Welcome. We're about to get started. Tristy's going to introduce the event in just a minute, but I just want to do some quick logistical information for you. Thank you for coming to the foundation and being here. It seems like many of you have already figured out that there's pizza and beer in the back. There's a little fridge in the back with soda as well, and we've water in the kitchen if anybody's thirsty. And then we have a bathroom just right around the corner. Anybody who's working on the event is wearing a name tag that has a view on it. So if you need anything from us, please feel free just to come and talk to one of us, and we can help you out. You should have all of the Wi-Fi password in front of you. And then we're also going to be recording this event for later. The camera will be on the front, so it won't capture any of you, and you won't be recording the group part. But just so you know, if you don't want to be on camera, then just don't come up front. And then Trusty will also be taking photos of the room. So if you're uncomfortable and you don't want any photos, just please let her know so that we can take you out of those later on. And then I think the last thing is that we're ending it. We have a hard deadline of 9 o'clock, so we'll be having everybody by 9 o'clock. So other than that, anything else? Good? All right, awesome. Thanks for being here. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this meetup. I'm Trusty. I work at the Wikimedia Foundation as well. I'm going to quickly give you an overview of our agenda today. We'll first have Juan Lara, who is our volunteer contributor, and contributes to media wiki documentation a lot. He's going to share his experience of contributing as a technical writer to the software. And then I'm going to point out at a few people present in this room, Mariel, Walker, Rohan, and Ryan, who are going to share a little bit about their projects and what opportunities we have in terms of documentation. And then after these presentations, we will break into small groups and then work on small tasks or at least take a look at the kind of opportunities we have with some of our projects. And after that group activity, I'll quickly do some announcement. We have a few documentation events and opportunities coming up very soon. So we will tell you more about that. I hope you will enjoy this meetup and over to Juan. Okay, thank you everyone for coming. So are there any first-time visitors today? Excellent. I hope you find the meetup as useful and as welcoming as I have. So my name is Juan. I'm one of the organizers of Write the Doc San Francisco. The other organizer here today for Write the Doc San Francisco, if you see around is Nico. And Nico made this awesome shirt that you can order through our website. So today we're talking about contributing to open source as a tech writer. And a little background on me. I'm a tech writer at a software company in Daily City called Genesis. And at Genesis, we do telecommunication software. So email, chat, and voice going through call centers. And at Genesis, we use MediaWiki as our documentation platform. So that's how I got introduced to MediaWiki. And after using it for a while and helping support the platform and doing a few extensions to it, I thought, hey, we use this platform. It's an open source platform. I should start to give back to this thing that's been so helpful. So I mentioned MediaWiki. And the first thing I want to clarify is the difference between these three terms. MediaWiki, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia. So the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia we all know and love. And MediaWiki is the software that Wikipedia runs on. And MediaWiki is a free open source software. And what that means is that you can download MediaWiki and look at all the source code. And you can take that source code, you can edit it how you want and make it useful to yourself. And what that also means is that you can contribute to the project. So if you find something that doesn't work quite right with MediaWiki or Wikipedia, you can go ahead and fix it and ask that that code is merged back into the main branch, the documentation source. So why you should contribute to open source or put another way, why you should work for free. The first thing I want to get across is that this is not quite the right way to think about it. Because like many other volunteer experiences, what you get out of your volunteer experiences is much more than what you put in. And the other thing that I've kind of noticed recently or noticed as I've volunteered with MediaWiki is that the maintainers, the people that you work with that are part of the project put a lot of their own time in helping volunteers and getting new contributors up and running. So the maintainer gives a lot of their time in answering questions and making sure you understand the task and also teaching you about the project you're working on. And what they're hoping they get out of the time they invest is a great documentation that'll help them on board for more contributors. And they're also hoping that you have a great volunteering experience and that you'll come back and keep working and keep enjoying the experience enough that you'll come back. And so as a contributor, as a volunteer, you give your time, but you also get a lot out of it. You get new knowledge, you get new skills. You get to ask a maintainer of one of the biggest websites in the world's questions. And as you create documentation, you also develop portfolio pieces that you can then use to apply to jobs and to further your career. So that's the first reason you might want to contribute to open source is to get noticed. So as you contribute to open source and you create documentation, you can use these as portfolio samples. And when you're a new tech writer, when you're trying to break into the field or when you're trying to maybe move from one type of documentation to another type to say a developer documentation, one thing people often tell you is, well, one thing you can do is take an existing piece of documentation and rewrite it. But I think through open source, you can take that even further and you can rewrite it and you can contribute it back to the project. And if it's an open source, they will really appreciate that. And also, as instead of just rewriting it and using it on your own blog or website, if you work with the project and contribute back to the project, you also demonstrate the full range of the technical writing skill set, which is learning a new project, researching a project, and also interacting with developers and showing that you can collaborate with developers and ask them good questions and collaborate with them to create a great piece of documentation. The other great reason you should contribute to open source, so you might consider is that it's great for learning a new technology or a new skill. And the way I like to use open source projects is a capstone for something I'm trying to learn. So for example, at our last meetup, there was a presentation on Python and how as a technical writer, you can really set yourself apart by learning Python. And so it was a very motivating presentation and motivated me to start to learn more Python. So I've started to look into Python and learn how to use it. And I saw that MediaWiki has a Python project. They have a project called PyWiki Bot, which is a Python-based framework that lets you automate edits to Wikipedia and MediaWiki. So as I'm learning Python, I'm using this open source documentation project as a capstone to my learning. So I can say, yes, I've learned Python and here's an example of documentation I've done with Python. And not only that, as you work with them, you get to ask the maintainers who, again, write the code for this project questions about what you're interested in learning about. And so this is an example of a few of the other technologies I've been able to practice as I, hello? Okay, sorry, I turned it off. So here are a few of the other technologies that I've gotten to practice with directly as I contributed to the MediaWiki documentation. PHP, the MediaWiki source code, the core source code is written in PHP. They also have a lot of JavaScript projects. Git, the MediaWiki uses a Git for source control. A vagrant and virtual box is a really fun one. That lets you set up a development environment on your own computer. So you can in a day download the source code and set up your own server that runs MediaWiki. You can play around with the source code, you can make changes, and you can learn PHP that way. And I already mentioned Python is the one I'm working on now through a Pi Wikipedia. And my third reason that I have here for contributing to Open Source is that you can tech write for good. So this is the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. And they believe in open and free knowledge for everyone. And my experience has been that you can really see that the people who work at the Wikimedia Foundation and the people that volunteer at Wikipedia and MediaWiki really believe in that. And every time I ask a question, someone answers it, they are very patient, knowledgeable, and they share that knowledge with you. And as you contribute to MediaWiki or another Open Source project, you know that you're contributing to a good project. Again, MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation has this mission statement and they're a nonprofit. And so this, your contributions carry forward to that project. So with it being a Wiki, it's very easy to get started as a contributor to MediaWiki documentation. You simply just need to create a mediawiki.org account and find an interesting project and you can start editing documentation right away. And so I wanted to just quickly introduce some of the tools that MediaWiki uses to manage their projects. So when you contribute to MediaWiki, these are the tools you'll be using and the tools you'll be learning. MediaWiki.org is the documentation Wiki. So that's where you'll find almost all of the documentation. A fabricator is their bug tracking system. So it's kind of like a JIRA when there's an issue or an improvement, they create a bug there. Sorry, they don't create a bug. They, thank you. They create a task there and they fill out the information and then you can come and say, hey, I want to work on this and they'll tell you, they'll help you understand what's needed, help you understand what's already there that you can use as a resource and work with you to write the documentation. Wikimedia Foundation loves IRC and the IRC is Internet Relay Chat and it's a chat room where you can ask questions in real time. So you can log on to one of the IRC chat rooms, just ask a question and usually within a day, someone will answer your question and they have different chat rooms for different projects. And the last, the other tool, that you'll see a lot of is a Garrett and Git. So Garrett is a code review system that runs on top of Git and one of our popular meetups recently was a workshop on Git. So this is another good opportunity to practice Git and show, demonstrate that you know Git and that you can use it in a real project. So this is mediawiki.org. So almost on any page you can, after you create your account, you can just hit edit and make changes to the documentation. Wikitext is pretty easy to learn. You can start to learn it and learn most of it within a day. And if you find any kind of error, you can go on and fix it right away. So if you find a typo, you can fix it. If you see a sentence that you feel can be clarified, you can go ahead and do it. And many times people will thank you for your edits. Mediawiki.org has this feature where if you see someone makes an edit you like, you can press a button that says thank you and they'll get enough notification that says, hey, so and so thank you for your edit. As I mentioned, Fabricator is a bug tracking system. So there you can see all the projects and all the different kind of work that Mediawiki Foundation is working on. In fact, this meetup itself was a Fabricator task. And you can search there for tasks related to a project. Many times those tasks will be later. They'll have a documentation related tasks that you can work on. And after you browse Fabricator for a while, you'll notice that this gets referenced and linked to different issues a lot. So this is kind of part of the culture of the Wikimedia Foundation is there's this bug T2001 that will probably never be closed. Oh, it used to be bug number one. So it just shows that Wikimedia Foundation understands the importance of documentation. And so yeah, it's kind of become a running joke, I think. If people find a project that maybe has documentation that can be improved, they'll link this bug to the project. And here's a IRC again, as explained earlier, it's a chat room where you can ask questions in real time. And this is a Garrett and a Git. So Garrett is used for a code review. So you can log on after you make a Garrett account, you can log on and you can see people making code contributions. You can see how people review contributions. And if you can go through this process yourself, if you find a project that you want to contribute code to, that's not something I've gotten to done, but it is one of my goals to get to the point where I can make a contribution to the source code itself. And lastly, I wanted to highlight something that I came across as I was beginning to contribute to the MediaWiki documentation is that I found this in the editing pages help and this is kind of the rules of Wiki editing is to be bold. When I started, I was kind of a little bit nervous to publish something on mediawiki.org because it would be incorrect or there'd be some kind of typo and it would be embarrassing, someone would see that. But then I saw this and this was very motivating. The number one rule of Wiki editing is to be bold. And so when you find something and you believe you can improve it, go ahead and do so. And of course, I made my first contribution and within a few minutes, someone found a typo and they fixed it and I thanked them for it. And so tonight, we Shristi gathered a few documentation tasks that we could work on. And I hope you have a lot of fun documenting and I encourage you to be bold and to learn and ask a lot of questions. Thank you, Juan, for such an amazing presentation. Next up, we'll have Moriel and Rohan. Hello. Hi. So I'm Moriel and this is Rohan. You didn't bring the another, okay, I'll speak then. Oh, there's another microphone. So we're both on the collaboration team and we do things like notifications. So when Juan says that you can thank someone and then that someone gets a notification that you thanked them, we worked on that among other things. And today, we'd like to introduce that as maybe a potential please help us documentation task. So we can introduce a little bit of notification. The documentation itself that we would love to have help with is to help other developers that are developing other extensions to help them understand how they can within their extension add a notification to. So connect to the core notifications that MediWiki supplies and create their own notification, whatever it is. So we already have a documentation but we could use some help on it. Let's put it this way. So let's start I think introducing what how notifications work. Yeah, how deep do you want to go with this? Probably not too deep. Just an overview. Do you want to start? Sure, okay. So I don't know how much is worth saying but so the basic thing that we're trying to document is how to create a new notification type. So for example, a thing that says you got thanked is a notification type. And it might say, you know, it might tell you who thanked you and what I didn't thank for and something like this person mentioned your name might be a different type. So we have some documentation on how you create new types of notifications. It's not great. And we would like to see it improved but I don't think that we should explain it in detail to the whole group on the summit. So how much do you want to? Yeah, so anyways, I think we were going to split into groups after the short introduction. So at that point, if you'll have any questions we'll be happy to answer. But I think what's important for this meetup is that we do have two pages that are explaining how to do it. One of them is a little bit older but contains more information and one of them is a little bit newer and more relevant, but has missing information from the other one. So we need help kind of like combining those two and writing them better. And the new one is a little bit more tutorial-like, like a little bit more step-by-step with code examples and stuff, but it's not very good and I could say that because I wrote it. So please help us. I didn't want to say it. And I think Volker. Apologies for the disorganization here. I knew I was going to be up here like two hours ago, I think. I knew before I just wrangled you to come with me. Volker. Hello, hello. My name is Volker. I'm on the editing design team and I care a lot about user interface and decision. And first of all, I'm very happy to see all those faces here. I'm very happy that you came today and to organize that. I'm out here because I'm working on our standard use interface library, OJSUI. And that use interface library is used in places like visual editor, in co-op, HS, in media wiki and has a lot of users and a lot of volunteer developers and it has a lot of documentation depth. And the task that I've identified to work with you if you're interested in is a pretty simple one and I would be happy if you come and talk to me. It's about our user interface side of it. We have screenshots provided. We had a technical writer about two years ago on that library and we have screenshots provided and since then our default interface theme has been overhauled and changed and it is still in the documentation are still the old screenshots. And that seems to me a very easy and simple way of getting started in media wiki and using media wiki, getting started with getting to know the environment and as a longer term idea we would like to have people interested in helping us identify problems with the documentation. There has been, it has been featured as one, so this year, I have to stop here for a second, this year we have been asking developers for their biggest needs and reducing the debt and improving the documentation on OHSUI has been mentioned as one of the top developer wishes on the so-called developer wish list. So that's a pretty strongly requested momentum that we have and it would be amazing to find people among you who want to, who are open to help us identifying, improving and getting the thing out to raise happiness among our contributors. I'm going to show for a moment, so this is the current documentation website. It has been, as I said, it has been put on by a professional technical writer and we're gonna, just to give you an insight, we're gonna provide here screenshots of the elements, but those are outdated. So this is like the very simple request that I have that we could look into together. But again, there's also a much bigger, more interesting, more compelling challenge to people like you helping us to identify the shortcomings and improve that part. That's it from my side. Thank you very much. Thank you, Morial, Rohan and Volker. So next up we have this small group working session and we have put together a list of tasks. Actually, only few of them are very small, but the rest of the tasks that you see on this link are very big, but we just wanted to give you a sense of documentation related opportunities we have and the related tasks. So before we split into groups, could we get a show of hands for people who are already familiar with Media Wiki here? Okay, so there are very few people, it seems like. So maybe what we can do is like one, like we can form a group of two to three people and then each group can have someone who already is familiar with Media Wiki and then we can maybe get into setting up account and take a look at some of the articles. We can maybe like people who are already familiar, we can point you to some articles and then you can take a look at them. Maybe help fix some small spelling mistakes or do a little bit of rewriting. I think that would be great. And before we split into groups, I would like to invite Ryan, who will share with us information about another documentation meetup which is happening next week. And then I'll share about another more opportunity. Media Wiki.org. Hey guys, I'm Ryan Caldari. I'm an engineering manager at The Foundation. And I was just gonna tell you guys about an event that's happening next week, next Friday called Media Wiki Documentation Day. So this is just a day when all the developers at The Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer developers and users and whoever wants to is gonna put aside doing their regular development work and just concentrate on doing documentation. So we've done some similar events in the past that were around like cleaning out our like code review backlog and things like that where we would just dedicate one day to like doing one thing as a focused group. And those events have usually been really effective and awesome and accomplished a lot. So we decided we were gonna try doing it with documentation, which we'd never done before. So we're gonna try that this coming next Friday. So if you guys are interested and wanna find out more about it or participate, just go to the webpage about the event which is on mediaweakie.org. Just search for MediaWeekie Documentation Day 2017. And this has, there's not a whole lot of information here but basically just like tells you what it's about, how it works, how to write good documentation for MediaWeekie. And then there's also a section for requests. So if there are any parts of MediaWeekie or anything related to MediaWeekie that doesn't make sense to you, you can request better documentation for it. And then people can volunteer to write that documentation. Or if you're somebody who's already familiar with a particular library or an extension for MediaWeekie and you see that somebody wants better documentation for it, you can fulfill one of these requests. So I guess that's it. Thanks. Thanks, Ryan. I also want to make an announcement about another meetup. How many of you by any chance are planning to attend write the docs event in Portland two weeks later? Three, four people. Okay, so we are also be participating in the writing day of that conference. And some of the big tasks that I have put together for this event, we are going to be working on that during the Portland conference. So you're welcome to join us. There will be other people from Foundation as well participating. So you're welcome to hang out with us and get some work done. And then a last thing that I wanted to say before we split into groups is that while you are working in small groups, I will come to your group and then encourage you to fill a short spreadsheet in that I have listed two questions. So if you're interested in opting to know more about our future events and also interested in continuing some of the conversations from this meetup, we will add you to our communication channel. Thanks.