Ask HN: Open-source projects that could use documentation help?
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?
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.
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?
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."
"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
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://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.
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 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.
https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/
https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Contributing
Documentation is a sore point for the majority of FOSS projects, just pick the one you like most and I'm sure they will be happy to have someone willing to help. :)
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...
I'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.
So I would honestly suggest your friend takes on something open source that he/she knows really well already, and is interested in taking a deep dive into.
There's not an open source project on the planet that would turn away better documentation, so it really doesn't matter what you choose. But choose something your friend CAN improve, with knowledge and understanding of how it works.
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.
https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/December...
I'm willing to help you learn the framework so you can write the docs.
The Erlang community has done a great job so far as it goes, but still needs help.
(Disclaimer, I am the leäd developer for the last few years)....
[edit] Come find us at shoebot.net [/edit]
Everyone, including your friend, should contribute to one they know how to use. If you don't know how to use it how are you going to write docs for it?