Technical Writer - Wikimedia Foundation

Can you envision yourself applying your technical writing and communication skills to make a positive impact in the world? Come work within the Technology department at the Wikimedia Foundation! We are looking for a Technical Writer to join our Developer Advocacy team.

As a technical writer, you will be working as part of a team to create and maintain educational material for a large community of free and open source software developers. Our technical community of staff and volunteers maintains and evolves MediaWiki and related software, and enhances the software experience for Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other free knowledge projects.

Our technical writers work in partnership with other teams and the community at large to prioritize areas of improvement, and then follow through on those priorities. You are required to become a generous and organized contributor on mediawiki.org and other wikis, and will support our efforts to introduce standards and best practices for technical documentation. Our globally distributed team works remotely, and so can you!

As a Technical Writer, we’d like you to do these things:

• Ensure developer documentation is clear, accurate and up-to-date and fulfills goal of expanding the developer community
• Produce high-quality and easy-to-understand documentation for a variety of engineering processes, API documentation, FAQs, user guides, standard operating procedures, etc.

• Work with teams and community volunteers to obtain an in-depth understanding of documentation needs and requirements
• Document new features, capabilities and other improvements in a timely fashion
• Create diagrams and illustrations as appropriate to improve readability and clarity
• Help expand the community of writers contributing to public documentation
• Communicate widely and frequently to a wide audience of staff, community members, and volunteers via mailing list, IRC, and wikis
• Share our values, respect our code of conduct, adhere to our team norms, and work in accordance with all three

Skills and Experience:

• Demonstrated experience in technical writing for software or infrastructure projects and creating technical documentation for developers
• Ability to understand complex technical concepts and make them understandable for others
• Demonstrated ability to create clear and compelling visual diagrams
• Strong research skills (as there will not always be developer support for some of the issues that need to be documented)
• Strong interpersonal skills, with track record of modeling good social and development practices
• Creative and highly motivated to serve diverse, multilingual and international communities
• Comfort in a collaborative, consensus-oriented and open environment
• Comfort using a wide variety of communication/collaboration tools including wikis, mailing lists, and IRC

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience using PHP, Python, Node.js, or other languages to build web applications is a strong plus
• Experience contributing to and participating in free and open-source software projects
• Experience working with and writing for diverse, multilingual and international communities
• The ability to speak multiple languages

Show us your stuff!

If you have writing examples you can share with us, please send links to these! If you have developed any open source software, or participated in online collaborative communities, share links as well. We would love to see your work!