Improve The Documentation Efforts By Taking A Survey

In an effort to figure out where resources should be applied to improve the documentation efforts of the WordPress project, there is an open survey that will be ongoing for the next few weeks. The survey is composed of 12, easy to answer questions which shouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes to answer. Along with this survey, there have been renewed efforts by a handful of people to get the various documentation projects up to date. To keep tabs on everything going on documentation wise for the WordPress project, you should subscribe to the Make WordPress Documentation website.

Speaking of documentation, how many of you have actually changed something on the Codex whether it be a typo, a bad link, or corrected information? I’ve made at least a few changes, such as typos and fixed a couple of broken links but nothing major. Just like many other aspects of the project, documentation is one of those thankless jobs. You can log into the Codex, make some changes and unless you brag about them, no one will ever know. However, documentation is one aspect of the project that impacts users for generations. While correcting a link or adding a paragraph of information is not critical to the Codex, it does provide a warm fuzzy feeling when you think about how many people may come across a page that you fixed so that instead of loading a 404 page which doesn’t help anyone, they get the information they were looking for.

Just for fun, I asked my twitter followers to tell me in 140 characters or less, why documentation is important to WordPress. This was one of their responses.

@wptavern Same reason documentation is important to anything: so people will know how to use it.

— Sallie Goetsch (@salliegoetsch) May 20, 2013