Ask HN: Open-source projects that could use documentation help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8368231

by untothebreach • 12 years ago

43 45 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

alex_duf• 12 years ago

MDN : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ All the new webrtc api need a refresh on their documentation.

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.

fergiwon• 12 years ago

If the goal is to gain more experience your friend should look for projects that appeal to them or are in an area they wish to gain experience in. For example, if they want to do code-level work, find a dev library - if they want to do user-level work find that. Also, some of the more established doc projects might be better to learn from than a project that has no docs - like the gnome docs team, etc.

collyw• 12 years ago

Respect for taking on some of the less desirable work in the technical world.

chadwickthebold• 12 years ago

This is an interesting problem, because it's not unique to technical writers.

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?

sciurus• 12 years ago

From what I've seen from the Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women, the GNOME project does a good job of mentoring new volunteers. I think there is a real need for technical writes to improve their various guides.

https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/

important• 12 years ago

You can check out the Apache open source projects , they list the documentation requirement as a JIRA bug.

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...

donniezazen• 12 years ago

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_Docs_Project

tdicola• 12 years ago

I'm not affiliated with the project, but I've used openFrameworks (http://www.openframeworks.cc/) and really liked the library but found the documentation is pretty lacking. It's basically just an API reference and a few small programming guides. Even as an experienced developer I still found myself stumbling over how basic things worked because the documentation didn't really give any guidance.

hangonhn• 12 years ago

AngularJS can really, really use some help there.

https://docs.angularjs.org/guide

https://docs.angularjs.org/api

malux85• 12 years ago

Another vote for this, at first Angular seems to have a lot of documentation, but when you try and use it, you find most of it is out of date, or no longer 'the angular way'

ldng• 12 years ago

Google could really pay for it. After all they're the copyright holders.

A lot of smaller OSS without coporate backing really need better docs.

rrrx3• 12 years ago

Extremely good call.

joshschreuder• 12 years ago

The docs are way, way better than a year or so ago, but I agree, they always need improvement.

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.

T-A• 12 years ago

This has been begging for bids for a while now: https://worklist.net/19870

devonbleak• 12 years ago

OpenStack.

npsimons• 12 years ago

Just start reading manual pages; I've come across quite a few grammar errors that could use cleaning up, I just haven't had the time.

larssorenson• 12 years ago

OpenSSL

currysausage• 12 years ago

The manpages for GNU utilities are usually stubs that essentially say:

  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 is, btw, one of the best reasons to love the BSDs.)

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.

justincormack2• 12 years ago

In particular I think the official Posix manpages are available under a free license, which should be the basis for the portable parts, with the Linux parts being extras.

pixelbeat• 12 years ago

Note newer versions of coreutils will have links in the man pages directly to online manuals through http://www.gnu.org/s/coreutils/ls etc.

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.

phillipuniverse• 12 years ago

BroadleafCommerce at http://www.broadleafcommerce.com/docs. Pull requests/changes are at https://github.com/BroadleafCommerce/docs

chipx86• 12 years ago

We're always looking for someone to help improve our documentation over at Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/).

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.

flexd• 12 years ago

While it may not look like it, in my opinion the uwsgi project desperately needs documentation help.

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.

marinaz• 12 years ago

Your friend might like to check out what documentation projects are available for the next round of the Outreach Program for Women internships.

https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/December...

js2• 12 years ago

The git man pages are a mess. And not easy to fix. But it is a much needed task.

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."

ibisum• 12 years ago

MOAI - its a fantastic framework for all kinds of things, but it always needs more documentation: http://getmoai.com/

I'm willing to help you learn the framework so you can write the docs.

RKoutnik• 12 years ago

A great opportunity here is Bluebird, the JS promises library [0]. The current documentation is nice, but only covers the API itself, with very few use cases. A "getting started" guide is badly needed for newcomers to BB and promises in general. A well-written guide would be a great star on your friend's resume.

[0] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird

inglor• 12 years ago

As a docs contributor, we'd love more better documentation and will entertain pull requests improving the documentation.

shazow2• 12 years ago

I'll throw urllib3 into the hat:

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.

pyre• 12 years ago

requests sits atop urllib3.

shazow2• 12 years ago

As the author of urllib3, this fact does not elude me.

perlgeek• 12 years ago

The Perl 6 project is always happy about doc contributions. Currently we have a specification, which is aimed at compiler writers: http://perlcabal.org/syn/ and then the beginning of some user-facing documentation: http://doc.perl6.org/

"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

xvilka• 12 years ago

Radare2 project needs good documentation too http://rada.re/y/?p=documentation

obulpathi• 12 years ago

I am working on a project called openstack-poppy For information about poppy: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Poppy https://poppy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ If you would like to contribute, please let me know.

stuaxo• 12 years ago

Shoebot, a python based creative coding tool could really do with better docs.

(Disclaimer, I am the leäd developer for the last few years)....

[edit] Come find us at shoebot.net [/edit]

akbarnama• 12 years ago

Clickable - http://www.shoebot.net

skreuzer• 12 years ago

Come join the FreeBSD documentation team and help improve what is already considered world class documentation

https://www.freebsd.org/docproj/

justincormack2• 12 years ago

Its far too good to need help. Clearly they want to show a before after comparison...

aktungmak2• 12 years ago

nimrod could really use better documentation... I am trying to get into it but unless you want to dig through the stdlib its quite hard to get up and running with a real project... esp GUI based

aktungmak2• 12 years ago

its a shame, because it is a really great language

baudehlo• 12 years ago

The biggest problem with this question is that to write good documentation for a project you need to really understand that project.

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.

lPrentice• 12 years ago

Erlang could definitely use help by putting libraries into context and more user-friendly documentation of library functions.

The Erlang community has done a great job so far as it goes, but still needs help.

EmanueleAina• 12 years ago

Depending on the type of documentation you want to write GNOME has plenty of options. Join the Documentation Project team and you can choose to work on user manuals, code tutorials, API docs for all the libraries in the stack (also used by EvolveOS, ElementaryOS, Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE) or even on the Human Interface Guidelines:

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. :)

J_Darnley• 12 years ago

Every project could use better docs.

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?

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

The select2 library could use some lovin' with actual examples: http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/

Ask HN: Open-source projects that could use documentation help?

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