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?
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for this, at first Angular seems to have a lot of documentation, but when you try and use it, you find most of it is out of date, or no longer 'the angular way'
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
https://docs.angularjs.org/guide
https://docs.angularjs.org/api