Difference between revisions of "Google Season of Docs 2022/Organize and Update Apertium User Documentation"
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=== The solution === |
=== The solution === |
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The solution to the above problem is to |
The solution to the above problem is to gather the existing documentation and tutorials into a single authoritative source and update them to match the current state of Apertium. |
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<!--The solution to the above problem is to create updated documentation for all pipeline modules and/or a full tutorial. |
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⚫ | Ideally documentation on a given tool will exist in a single place, and a full tutorial will also have a single unified source. One possibility is to generate one set of docs from another, or from a single unified source. For example, if we want tools to be documented in both their GitHub repos and on the wiki, we should generate one set of documentation from the other (or a third source). If we want a full tutorial to be on the wiki but also available in PDF format, then we should designate one source as the original and generate the others from them. |
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⚫ | Ideally documentation on a given tool will exist in a single place, and a full tutorial will also have a single unified source. One possibility is to generate one set of docs from another, or from a single unified source. For example, if we want tools to be documented in both their GitHub repos and on the wiki, we should generate one set of documentation from the other (or a third source). If we want a full tutorial to be on the wiki but also available in PDF format, then we should designate one source as the original and generate the others from them. --> |
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=== The scope === |
=== The scope === |
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== Budget == |
== Budget == |
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| Paying technical writer |
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! $6000 |
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Revision as of 21:08, 24 March 2022
Contents
About Apertium
Apertium is a free and open source machine translation and language technology platform. We have over 500 languages and pairs, maintained using 15+ different tools.
About the project
The problem
Apertium's wiki and other documentation are out of date, poorly organized, not visible enough, and just plain not user-friendly.
This ranges from documentation of individual tools not reflecting their current state, to our best how-to guides reflecting how things were done a decade ago. Documentation is scattered between the Apertium wiki, individual GitHub repos, an out-of-date pdf "Book", and even published papers and third party sites.
The result is new users and contributors wasting time reading out-of-date materials, and even long-time contributors having no way to be aware of changes to the tools they use.
The solution
The solution to the above problem is to gather the existing documentation and tutorials into a single authoritative source and update them to match the current state of Apertium.
The scope
- Overview of the Apertium platform
- All stages of the Apertium pipeline
- The main approaches to and tools for each stage
Measuring success
Unfortunately, the only metric we have is how many people contact us either via mailing list or IRC, and that number has fallen drastically during the Covid-19 pandemic. But from both feedback and direct questioning, we know contributors (potential and current) manage to find incorrect or outdated documentation.
So the way we would measure success is that the number of contributors somehow winding up following an old tutorial drops close to zero.
Existing Documentation
Formal Descriptions
Source | Mostly Complete | Partial |
---|---|---|
2.0 docs |
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wiki |
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github |
|
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external sources |
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missing:
- build scripts (filter-rules, etc)
- spellchecker
- postgenerator?
Tutorials
Even things in the "substantive" column will likely need a fair amount of work for the purposes of this project.
Source | Substantive | Fragmentary |
---|---|---|
Apertium wiki |
|
|
User:Firespeaker's course wiki |
|
|
missing:
- HFST
- tagger
- separable
Timeline
This follows the 4-part division of https://documentation.divio.com
Time Period | Goal | Details | Deliverable |
---|---|---|---|
Phase 1: Reference | |||
Week 1
May 1-7 |
Gather and convert existing documentation |
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Single canonical source containing existing info |
Weeks 2-4
May 8-28 |
Fill in gaps in formal docs |
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Up-to-date formal documentation of main pipeline modules and common build scripts |
Phase 2: Tutorials | |||
Weeks 5-7
May 29-June 18 |
Dictionary tutorials |
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Information sufficient to get a beginner set up and contributing to lexicons |
Weeks 8-10
June 19-July 2 |
Transfer tutorials |
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Systematic tutorial for writing transfer rules |
Weeks 11-13
July 3-23 |
Other tutorials |
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End-to-end tutorial for the translation pipeline |
Phase 3: Explanation | |||
Weeks 14-15
July 24-August 6 |
Theoretical background |
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Introductions to why Apertium uses the technology that it does |
Phase 4: How-to guides and code structure | |||
Weeks 16-18
August 7-27 |
How-to and code |
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Guidelines for contributing to the code |
Budget
Budget item | Amount |
---|---|
Paying technical writer | $6000 |
TOTAL: | $6000 |