Summary for Docs Team Meeting: March 2, 2020

Attendance

  • Milana Cap
  • Jon Ang
  • Yui ゆい
  • Denis Žoljom
  • Prashant Baldha
  • Chris Van Patten
  • theMikeD
  • Jb Audras
  • Akira Tachibana
  • Estela Rueda
  • Birgit Pauli-Haack
  • Jono Alderson
  • John Blackbourn

Actionable Points

  • Jon to await Matt’s response to his questions about licensing of content on w.org.
  • JB to ask about proposing changes to recommendations in the next coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. meeting (not docs specific).
  • Jon to investigate cross-posting the announcement of the start of the meeting in #core.
  • Estela to propose further discussion of the docs reclassification for next week’s meeting.

Next Meeting

Monday, March 9, 2020, 15:00 UTC on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. #docs

Documentation Licenses

Jon has spoken with Shiobhan McKeown and Sam Sidler who’ve informed him that the Codex is licensed under GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. v2. Much of the content on HelpHub originated from the Codex, therefore relicensing the content would likely involve getting explicit permission from every author involved for every line of documentation.

Jon is waiting for Matt Mullenweg to confirm about the existing licensing of the Codex, there is currently no license declaration on the Codex.

It was pointed out that many handbook pages were written from scratch, but there’s a good chance that they contain derivative content from the Codex anyway. This means they may need to remain GPL licensed.

Chris van Patten pointed out that GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/’s documentation is part of the Gutenberg repo and therefore falls under its same GPL license.

The REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. documentation is currently unlicensed.

WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ documentation is MIT licensed.

Jon will follow up with further discussion on this topic in a post on the Docs P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.

Policy for External Linking

Jon pointed out that various docs on w.org link to external resources that might not be correct and might not have been audited. Akira confirmed that dead links and some links with heavy advertising were removed during the migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. to HelpHub.

Jon posed whether such links should be audited, removed, or left, what kind of links should get in or not, and what kind of links are appropriate, and what to do about links whose content changes over time.

A few people expressed interest in discouraging external linking at all, but there was no consensus. Further discussion needed.

Jono mentioned that the general policy of the forums is that linking out is bad, because links break, and because the motivations and value of external resources can’t be trusted, but noted that this can mean users miss out from accessing otherwise valuable external resources.

Open Floor

JB asked what is the best way to propose changes to the “abbreviation best practices” section of the Core Handbook. He’s going to mention it during the next core chat as this isn’t specific to the docs team.

Estela mentioned that she’s unsure about how to proceed with the documentation reclassification. Jon suggested bringing this up for further discussion next week, Estela agreed.

John (myself) pointed out that the starting of the #docs meeting doesn’t get automatically cross-posted into the #core channel like other meetings do. Jon will investigate.