We’ve made a lot of progress on moving forward with MDN Web Docs in the last couple of months, and we wanted to share where we are headed in the short- to mid-term, starting with our editorial strategy and renewed efforts around community participation.
New editorial strategy
Our updated editorial strategy has two main parts: the creation of content pillars and an editorial calendar.
The MDN writers’ team has always been responsible for keeping the MDN web platform reference documentation up-to-date, including key areas such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web APIs. We are breaking these key areas up into “content pillars”, which we will work on in turn to make sure that the significant new web platform updates are documented each month.
Note: This also means that we can start publishing our Firefox developer release notes again, so you can keep abreast of what we’re supporting in each new version, as well as Mozilla Hacks posts to give you further insights into what we are up to in Firefox engineering.
We will also be creating and maintaining an editorial calendar in association with our partners on the Product Advisory Board — and the rest of the community that has input to provide — which will help us prioritize general improvements to MDN documentation going forward. For example, we’d love to create more complete documentation on important web platform-related topics such as accessibility, performance, and security.
MDN will work with domain experts to help us update these docs, as well as enlist help from you and the rest of our community — which is what we want to talk about for the rest of this post.
Community call for participation
There are many day-to-day tasks that need to be done on MDN, including moderating content, answering queries on the Discourse forums, and helping to fix user-submitted content bugs. We’d love you to help us out with these tasks.
To this end, we’ve rewritten our Contributing to MDN pages so that it is simpler to find instructions on how to perform specific atomic tasks that will help burn down MDN backlogs. The main tasks we need help with at the moment are:
- Fixing MDN content bugs — Our sprints repo is where people submit issues to report problems found with MDN docs. We get a lot of these, and any help you can give in fixing issues would be much appreciated.
- Help beginners to learn on MDN — Our Learn web development pages get over a million views per month, and have active forums where people go to ask for general help, or request that their assessments be marked. We’d love some help with answering posts, and growing our learning community.
We hope these changes will help revitalize the MDN community into an even more welcoming, inclusive place where anyone can feel comfortable coming and getting help with documentation, or with learning new technologies or tools.
If you want to talk to us, ask questions, and find out more, join the discussion on the MDN Web Docs chat room on Matrix. We are looking forward to talking to you.
Other interesting developments
There are some other interesting projects that the MDN team is working hard on right now, and will provide deeper dives into with future blog posts. We’ll keep it brief here.
Platform evolution — MDN content moves to GitHub
For quite some time now, the MDN developer team has been planning a radical platform change, and we are ready to start sharing details of it. In short, we are updating the platform to move from a Wiki approach with the content in a MySQL database, to a JAMStack approach with the content being hosted in a Git repository (codename: Project Yari).
This will not affect end users at all, but the MDN developer team and our content contributors will see many benefits including a better contribution workflow (via Github), better ways in which we can work with our community, and a simplified, easier-to-maintain platform architecture. We will talk more about this in the next blog post!
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