Google Season of Docs 2022/Organize and Update Apertium User Documentation

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Apertium's wiki and other documentation are out of date, poorly organized, not visible enough, and just plain not user-friendly.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 Documentation is scattered between the Apertium wiki, individual GitHub repos, an out-of-date pdf "Book", and even published papers and third party sites.

The result is new users and contributors wasting time reading out-of-date materials, and even long-time contributors having no way to be aware of changes to the tools they use.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 create updated documentation for all pipeline modules and/or a full tutorial.

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.

The scope

• Overview of the Apertium platform
• All stages of the Apertium pipeline
• The main approaches to and tools for each stage