Improving Documentation via the Community.

Have you ever had to deal with incorrect documentation? Or been frustrated by a typo? Or been annoyed that a how-to guide uses an old version of an interface?

Now you can fix it!

Many software providers are now using community-editable documentation online. This isn’t a Wikipedia style free-for-all, but a carefully moderated process ensuring that the resulting document is accurate.  If you come across an error in an online doc, or even a PowerShell help page, check and see if you can submit edits.

Continuous deployment pipelines mean that these edits can make it into live documentation in a matter of hours or days- impressive times if you’ve ever submitted an errata to a printed book, or submitted a bug request to get online documentation fixed.

docs.Microsoft.com

If you visit a Microsoft docs page, you’ll see an Edit link at the top of the screen (see (1) in the screenshot below). Clicking on this takes you to a page on Github with the source of the document. Click there to edit the file and a git fork will be made under your own profile- make your edits and submit a merge request and, once approved, your updates will appear in the original website. You’ll even get a little credit (see (2) in the screenshot below) for your contribution.

In this particular example I was following the step-by-step guide and noticed that the wording in the document no longer matched the Azure Portal. I was quickly able to suggest a fix and later that day the page was updated and anyone else following the instructions wouldn’t be misled. Two minutes of my time hopefully saved ten minutes of head-scratching by someone else.

VMware PowerCLI Example Scripts

As the name suggests, the source code for some example PowerCLI scripts has been published by VMware supported by members of the #vCommunity. If you find an error in the scripts you can pop over to Github and correct them- and remember this isn’t just the code of the script, but also it’s accompanying documentation.

In this example a typo in the get-help file was spotted and quickly corrected. Whilst the spelling mistake wasn’t a show-stopper this shows how quick and easy it is to contribute to these projects without being a coding guru.

Summary

Many of these projects use Github and learning how to use that version control platform isn’t arduous- especially for small changes like these- and is a useful skill to pickup if you don’t already have it. The important message here is you don’t need to be a developer to contribute to the code.

So, next time you spot a mistake in documentation, see if you can fix it yourself and help the next person who comes along.