THE FUTURE OF DREAMWIDTH DOCS!

[ivorygates]

Now that we're in Open Beta, we're getting to see how actual people who aren’t us are using the site, and this is letting us know how we need to revise our documentation and, of course, write more.

One of the things we're viewing with enthusiasm now that many of our tasks are no longer as time-critical is the opportunity to allow many more people to participate in our process. In the past several months, a lot of people have wanted to get involved in site documentation, but there were a number of reasons we couldn't accept all the help that was offered.

We have now remedied that small problem.

The new community dw_docs_training is intended as a dedicated work and training environment for new volunteers, experienced members of the docs team, and for anyone who's working on related aspects of the GUI, such as the site copy team and the site styles team. dw_docs_training will be a closed, moderated, response-screened community so we can concentrate on the training and support aspects of docs writing.

In dw_docs_training, we'll expect you to write material off a supplied prompt and we'll the result in the community for critique. To ensure the critiquing process remains useful and focused, your sample exercises will be re-posted by one of the community moderators, and all comments will be unscreened at the same time, and only when everybody who needs to comment on the entry has commented.

Your material will be judged by three criteria: accuracy (does the site behave in the fashion you indicate?), clarity (can an inexperienced or confused reader understand what you've written and follow any directions included?) and conformity with the Dreamwidth style as laid out in the Manual of Style.

If you are participating in the community as a proofreader or copyeditor, the procedure you'll follow will be similar, except you won't be posting entries, you'll be commenting on the entries of others.

In addition to participating in dw_docs_training, all volunteers in training will be expected to read all of the FAQs. Not only will this give you a broad familiarity with the documentation, there are many places in which it hasn't yet reached perfection: this will be your chance to see if you can find errors.

You'll also need to familiarize yourself thoroughly with the Dreamwidth Manual of Style and the Dreamwidth Site Terminology, both of which can be found on the Dreamwidth Wiki.

The Dreamwidth Manual of Style:
http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Manual_of_Style

The Dreamwidth Terminology Notes:
http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Terminology

What we want out of this process, and we hope you want it too, is for you to be able to write a FAQ or other piece of site copy to site standard language, or (if you aren't one of our writers) to be able to review a piece of site copy, detect typos and other problems, identify those areas in which it does not meet the Dreamwidth standard, and prepare useful revision notes for its author.

We'll be posting the details of how to apply to the Docs Team here in dw_docs very soon.

DREAMWIDTH DOCUMENTATION TEAM VOLUNTEERS APPLICATION

[ivorygates]

Well that didn't take long, did it? Application under the cut.

( Read more... )

DREAMWIDTH DOCUMENTATION TEAM VOLUNTEERS APPLICATION: THE COMMENT THREAD

[ivorygates]

Comments are disabled on the application itself. Questions or comments go here.

Buy Paid Account page

[wyntarvox]

As of the recent code push, the URL to the paid accounts FAQ has been exposed to the following strings on /shop/account.bml:

.intro.self
.intro.gift
.intro.new

The idea is to help explain the different tiers of paid accounts, which people may not know about until they see them on this page.

Some changes to how we're using this community

[rho]

As well as the addition of dw_docs_training that ivorygates has already mentioned, we're also going to be making a few changes to how we're running dw_docs itself.

First off, we're going to be moderating entries on this community. As I write this, there are 576 members here, and we're taking this step now to keep the number of entries here manageable and make sure that everything stays on topic. We want for this to be a community that anyone interested in documentation can read without being snowed under with the volume of entries.

Things that will be on topic here:

• Any announcements ivorygates and I make (for example, "we need volunteers for this project!").
• Summaries of which FAQs we've changed recently.
• Discussion of broad-stroke documentation issues (for instance, "how do we best handle accessibility in our FAQs?").
• People from other Dreamwidth projects keeping us informed of things that will be relevant to documentation (for example, "hey, we're going to be adding this big new feature soon so you might want to start documenting it now".

Notable things that won't be on topic:

• Suggestions for things that need adding or changing (see below for how we're going to be handling these.
• General Dreamwidth suggestions, which belong in dw_suggestions.
• The actual process of writing things or questions about this, which will be going in dw_docs_training.

We're not going to switch over to being a moderated community for a couple of days yet at least. We want to give you all time to spot anything we might have missed before we do this. I'll also add that we're still going to be keeping open membership here, and we won't be screening comments. It will only be top-level entries that we'll be moderating.

As I mentioned above, we're not going to be taking suggestions for improvements in entries to this community any more. Instead, we'll be posting a "suggestions box" entry every month, and then having people comment there with their suggestions and feedback. We'll also keep a link to the current suggestions box thread in our profile. This way, people who are interested will be able to track comments on the entry, but people who aren't interested will be able to stay subscribed to the community without having to sit through all the suggestions posts.

We'll be going through the suggestions as they come in, and then migrating them over to a master list of Things That Need To Be Done which our hard working doc team (and doc trainees!) will be able to work off without having to track around the community looking for what's already been dealt with and what hasn't.

Again, we'll be waiting at least a couple of days before we implement this, so we can make any changes we need to based on your feedback.