Meta:web platform wednesday
Welcome to Web Platform Wednesdays!
This is a description of the specific focus we have for each week in our effort to review and improve the JavaScript reference pages.
If this is your first time contributing in Web Platform Wednesdays, please read the ”Getting involved” section later in this page.
To get started, pick a task for an article, and email the public-webplatform email list to reserve that task for yourself!
Week 1-3
| Article Name | Spec URL | Coordinator | Basic facts | Explanatory text | Examples | Links | Review | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Array | sec-15.4 | Julee | Julee - DONE! | Julee - DONE! | Julee - DONE! | |||
| Array/constructor | sec-15.4 | Julee | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | ||
| Array/isArray | sec-15.4 | Eliot-MSFT | Lleonard - In progress | Lleonard - In progress | Lleonard - In progress | Lleonard - In progress | ||
| Array/length | sec-15.4 | Shepazu | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | Hiroki - In progress | ||
| Array/prototype | sec-15.4 | Julee | ||||||
| Array/concat | sec-15.4 | Eliot-MSFT | ||||||
| Array/every | sec-15.4 | Shepazu | ||||||
| Array/filter | sec-15.4 | Julee | ||||||
| Array/forEach | sec-15.4 | Eliot-MSFT | Zbikowski - “In progress” | |||||
| Array/indexOf | sec-15.4 | Shepazu |
Please pick any open task for one of the articles list above, and notify the coordinator by emailing the public-webplatform@w3.org. If the table cell for a task has a user name in it, then that task has already been chosen by someone else, so please pick another.
The article should already have a page created, linked from the article name; if the page doesn’t exist, feel free to contact the coordinator. The details for each article, including the link to the relevant specification, the topic cluster, and any notes, are available from the link in the details column.
Some of these articles need to be created, some need improvements and thorough review, some need the best examples and best practices add. All of these tasks are critical! Once you’re finished your tasks, notify the coordinator by emailing the public-webplatform@w3.org. And don’t forget to tweet about it, @webplatform and hashtag #wpw.
Getting involved
You don’t have to be an expert to participate! For example of some general tasks, check out some of the basic-facts tasks.
If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please pick one or more articles or topics for the current week in the table above. Each week, we will report on the previous week, and note all who have contributed. Contributors to this push can add a unique “badge” for their profile page and website that shows them as one of the FireStarters of WPD, so people will see that you were one of the special early contributors.
Once you have the articles and tasks you want to take charge of, just notify the appropriate coordinator via email or IRC, and get started!
We only have 1 week to get each set of articles done, so only bite off as much as you can chew in one week. Our aim is to get into a rhythm of clear and steady progress towards our goal.
If you don’t have time this week, check back next week… there’s plenty of work to be done!
Tasks
- Basic facts, such as overview table, syntax, and values. See basic-facts tasks.
- Explanatory text, such as the introduction (summary), usage, and notes
- Examples, with explanations (Code sample best practices)
- Links to tutorials and other materials (either inside WPD or on the wider web), to the relevant specifications, and cross-linking keywords to other reference articles
- Review, including flagging and unflagging
Whether you have 5 hours or only 15 minutes a week, helping with one of these tasks for will be greatly appreciated. The table above shows the articles we’re looking for help on this week, and all the tasks needed for that article. If there is a name listed in the task for an article, that means someone has already signed up to do that task, so please pick another.
If you don’t find a specific topic you’re interested in here, you can check the master list of articles needed, and pick one. We’ll be happy to add it to the list and find a coordinator to help you out.
For explanatory text and examples, we are asking for original contributions, not material copied from some other site like MDN. We need to ensure that Web Platform Docs is as reusable as possible, and so we need to use the CC-BY license; MDN uses an incompatible license, CC-BY-SA, which has more restrictions on reuse. Providing your own material after a bit of research (reading the spec and other articles) and experimentation will be more rewarding and will provide us with better material over time. If there is an existing article that is marked at the bottom of the page as having content from a CC-BY-SA source, please reword these sections of the article, so we can remove the license restriction. This is a great help! (Note that purely factual, non-prose information such as the overview table, syntax, and values, and links to external resources are not subject to copyright, and so are free from license issues.)
Once you are finished with your task and have let your coordinator know, we ask that you let others know about your contribution… tweet about it, announce it on Facebook or G+, or tell your local user group about it. We will retweet these announcements from our own twitter feed. This will build interest and momentum in the project, and help us meet our goal.
We also ask that you consider keeping a rough estimate of how much time each task took you (rounding up to the nearest 15 minutes) and report it back to the coordinator. They’ll note it in their end-of-week report (with your permission), so we can streamline our process and help others understand how much time a task is likely to take them; once you’ve contributed to a few articles, it will also be interesting to compare your times, see improvements in efficiency, or note how certain articles were more challenging than others. If you don’t want to do keep track of your time, no problem! We’re grateful for any time and effort you put into helping Web Platform Docs!
Note: Currently, we are asking contributors not to change the information in the compatibility tables, since we are working on an automated system that will pull data from CanIUse.com, Quirksmode, MDN, and other reliable sources, and any changes will be lost.
Coordinator
An advisor is assigned to one or more articles as be the point person in charge of making sure the work happens, and reporting on its status. When a contributor express willingness to do a task for an article, the coordinator marks that item as having an assignee, trains the contributor in editing the wiki (if necessary), answers any questions that might arise, follows up to see if the work is being done in a timely way, and ensures that final review is done.
Coordinators are strongly encouraged to commit to at least one editing task within their own set of articles, so they have hands-on experience and can better help other contributors… and also to help the work get done!
At the end of the work period (the Tuesday before the weekly meeting), the coordinator makes sure that the master list is updated with all tasks performed for each article.
If you are a contributor who has shown yourself to be reliable and have good judgment, we encourage you to become a coordinator yourself. Coordinators get a special badge for their profile available only to the truly dedicated.