Technical documentation checklist and templates

Overview

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

Become familiar with the MediaWiki Technical Documentation Style Guide.
Decide what kind of technical document is most appropriate.
Gather your information. Make sure you have all of your links, data, that you will need to include.

Wikimedia documention templates is a very useful list of templates that can enhance your technical documentaton on Wikitech.
MediaWiki Technical Documentation Style Guide
Technical documentation templates and suggestions on MediaWiki. You may find something useful here you would like to import to your documentation on Wikitech.

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

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.
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}}
An Overview: This is a short statement about the document, who it is for, why it is useful.
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).
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.
See Also:
Categories: For Toolforge or Cloud VPS, Categories: Cloud VPS, Toolforge, Administration or Administrator (for Admin pages), Documentation, Cloud Services

Cloud VPS: You can copy/paste the source code from the Cloud VPS technical documentation template into new documentation pages to help get you started.
Toolforge: You can copy/paste the source code from the Toolforge technical documentation template into new documentation pages to help get you started.

A set of technical document markup templates are available on MediaWiki.org. Some or all may need to be localized for Wikitech.

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

Create a Phabricator task with the following: Technical Review for: link to page
Tags: Cloud VPS or Toolforge and Documentation
Subscribers: Yourself and others who may be able to review
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?"
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.

We communicate and provide support through several primary channels. Please reach out with questions and to join the conversation.

Communicate with us
	Connect	Best for
Phabricator Workboard	#Cloud-Services	Task tracking and bug reporting
IRC Channel	#wikimedia-cloud ^connect Telegram bridge mattermost bridge	General discussion and support
Mailing List	cloud@	Information about ongoing initiatives, general discussion and support
Announcement emails	cloud-announce@	Information about critical changes (all messages mirrored to cloud@)
News wiki page	News	Information about major near-term plans
Cloud Services Blog	Clouds & Unicorns	Learning more details about some of our work
Wikimedia Technical Blog	techblog.wikimedia.org	News and stories from the Wikimedia technical movement