Uploaded image for project: 'Data Management'
  1. Data Management
  2. DM-11462

Create a living DM user documentation content style guide

    XMLWordPrintable

    Details

      Description

      Early experience from creating pipe_base documentation has shown that we need a user documentation content style guide to help us effectively produce consistent and high-quality documentation for end-users.

      This style guide becomes a place to:

      • Discuss tone and voice for specific types of end-user documentation and share technical writing advice.
      • List preferred spellings, especially for domain-specific words. For example, "subtask" or "sub-task" — I've seen both in existing documentation. We need to decide on one. We also need a place to remind use that it's spelled "GitHub."
      • Discuss grammar and style issues beyond what is already in the Project Publications Style Manual.

      The intent of the user documentation style guide is to respectfully build upon the Project Publications Style Manual. The DM user documentation style guide's default stance should be to inherit the recommendations of the Project style guide. In rare occasions, we may need to override its advice to adopt best practices specific to end-user documentation writing. It's possible that the DM user documentation style guide's recommendations could eventually get moved to Project Publications Style Manual, but I think we will always need a style guide specifically for user documentation because of the unique requirements of user documentation compared to management documentation and scientific articles.

      This ticket will seed the user documentation content style guide as a sub-section of the DM Developer Guide.

        Attachments

          Issue Links

            Activity

            Hide
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment -

            Two user documentation style guides that are open source (CC-BY licensed) are:

            I think it'd be a good to directly port relevant pages from the Google style guide to form the beginnings of the LSST User Documentation Style Guide. I like Google's docs and I think their style and tone match what I hope to build at LSST.

            Show
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment - Two user documentation style guides that are open source (CC-BY licensed) are: Google: https://developers.google.com/style/ (this is new and very comprehensive) 18F: https://content-guide.18f.gov/ I think it'd be a good to directly port relevant pages from the Google style guide to form the beginnings of the LSST User Documentation Style Guide. I like Google's docs and I think their style and tone match what I hope to build at LSST.
            Hide
            krzys Krzysztof Findeisen added a comment -

            Hmm... the former describes itself as developer documentation, not end-user documentation. Does that mean our end-users are third-party developers? (Please answer this question in the style guide!)

            Show
            krzys Krzysztof Findeisen added a comment - Hmm... the former describes itself as developer documentation, not end-user documentation. Does that mean our end-users are third-party developers? (Please answer this question in the style guide!)
            Hide
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment - - edited

            Krzysztof Findeisen, the Google style guide is suited for any kind of technical documentation.

            When they say "developer documentation," Google is talking about the developers who use and build upon their products (an example of their end-user documentation is https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/). This matches up well with LSST where our audience is also fairly technical: astronomers using our data releases and astronomer-engineers building upon our software.

            Show
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment - - edited Krzysztof Findeisen , the Google style guide is suited for any kind of technical documentation. When they say "developer documentation," Google is talking about the developers who use and build upon their products (an example of their end-user documentation is https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ ). This matches up well with LSST where our audience is also fairly technical: astronomers using our data releases and astronomer-engineers building upon our software.
            Hide
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment -

            The new focus of this ticket is to specifically implement RFC-555:

            Show
            jsick Jonathan Sick added a comment - The new focus of this ticket is to specifically implement RFC-555 : Add a new page/area to https://developer.lsst.io  that represents the homepage the the "DM user documentation style guide" Link to the Google Developer Documentation Style Guide  as the basis of our own style. Announce the new style guide and recommended usage on https://community.lsst.org .
            Hide
            afausti Angelo Fausti added a comment -

            Looks great! The page has information and links to user documentation style guide in the DM developer guide. It clarifies where to use the style guide and contexts where the style guide does not apply.

            Show
            afausti Angelo Fausti added a comment - Looks great! The page has information and links to user documentation style guide in the DM developer guide. It clarifies where to use the style guide and contexts where the style guide does not apply.

              People

              Assignee:
              jsick Jonathan Sick
              Reporter:
              jsick Jonathan Sick
              Reviewers:
              Angelo Fausti
              Watchers:
              Angelo Fausti, David Shupe, Jonathan Sick, Krzysztof Findeisen, Tim Jenness
              Votes:
              0 Vote for this issue
              Watchers:
              5 Start watching this issue

                Dates

                Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved:

                  Jenkins

                  No builds found.