Documentation needs review tools, not Wikis

I’m a strong believer on documentation being a fundamental feature of open source, although myself I’m probably bad at following my own advice. While I do write down a lot of running notes on this blog, as I said before, blogs don’t replace documentation. I have indeed complained about how hard it seems to be to publish documentation that is not tied to a particular codebase, but there’s a bit more that I want to explore.

I have already discussed code reviews in the past few months — and pointing out how the bubble got me used to review tooling (back in the days this would be called CASE). The main thing that I care for, with these tools, is that they reduce the cost of the review, which makes it less likely that a patch is left aside for too long — say for three weeks, because one reviewer points out that the code you copied from one file to another is unsafe, and the other notes they missed it the first time around, but now it’s your problem to get it fixed.

In a similar spirit, “code reviews” for documentation are an incredibly powerful tool. Not just for the documentation quality, but also because of the inclusiveness of them. Let me explain, focusing in particular with documentation that is geared toward developers — because that’s what I know the most of. Product documentation, and documentation that is intended for end users, is something I have had barely any contact with, and I don’t think I would have the experience to discuss the matter.

So let’s say you’re looking a tool’s wiki page, and follow the instructions in it, but get a completely different result than you expected. You think you know why (maybe something has changed in one of the tool’s dependencies, maybe the operating system is different, or maybe it never worked in the first place), and you want to fix the documentation. If you just edit the wiki, and you’re right, you’re saving a lot of time and grief to the next person that comes over to the documentation.

But what happens if you’re wrong?Well, if you’re wrong you may be misinterpreting the instructions, and maybe give a bad suggestion to the next person coming over. You may be making the equivalent change of all the bad howto docs that say to just chmod 0777 /dev/something to make some software work — and the next person will find instructions that work, but open a huge gaping security hole into a software.

Do you edit the Wiki? Are you sure that there’s enough senior engineers knowing the tool that can notice you edited the wiki, and revert your change if it is wrong? You may know who has the answer, and decide to send them a note with the change “Hey, can you check if I did it right?” but what if they just went into a three weeks vacation? What if they end up in the hospital after writing about LED lights?

And it’s not just a matter of how soon someone might spot a mistaken edit. There’s the stress of not knowing (or maybe knowing) how such a mistake would be addressed. Will it be a revert with “No, you dork!”, or will it be an edit that goes into further details of what the intention was and what the correct approach should have been in the first place? Wikipedia is an example of something I don’t enjoy editing, despite doing it from time to time. I just find some of its policy absurdist — including having given me a hard time while trying to correct some editor’s incorrect understanding of my own project, while at the same time having found a minor “commercial open source” project having what I would call close to an advertisement piece, with all the references pointing at content written by the editor themselves — who happen to be the main person behind such project.

Review-based documentation systems – including Google’s g3doc, but also the “humble” Google Docs suggested edits! – alleviate this problem, particularly when you do provide a “fast path” for fixing obvious typos without going through the full review flow. But otherwise, they allow you to make your change, and then send it to someone who can confirm it’s right, or start discussing what the correct approach should be — and if you happen to be the person doing the review, be the rake collector, help clearing documentation!

Obviously, it’s not perfect — if all your senior engineers are jerks that would call names the newcomer making a mistake in documentation, the review would be just as stressful. But it gives a significant first mover advantage: you can (often) choose who to send the review to. And let’s be honest: most jerks are bullies, and they will be less likely to call names the newcomer, when they already got a sign off from another senior person.

This is not where it ends, either. Even when you are a senior engineer, or very well acquainted with a certain tool, you may still want to run documentation changes through someone else because you’re not sure how they will be read. For me, this often is related to the fact that English is not my native language — I may say something in such a way that is, in my head, impossible to misunderstand, and yet confuse everybody else reading it, because I’m using specialised terms, uncommon words, or I keep insisting on using a word that doesn’t mean what I think it means.

As an aside, if you read most of my past writing, you may have noticed I keep using the word sincerely when I mean honestly or truthfully. This is a false friend from Italian, where sincero means truthful. It’s one particular oddity that I was made aware of and tried very hard to get rid of, but still goes through at times. For the same reason, I tend to correct other people with the same oddity, as I trained myself to notice it.

And while non-native English speakers may think of this problem more often, it’s not to say that none of the English native speakers pay attention to this, or that they shouldn’t have someone else read their documentation first. In particular, when writing a tutorial it is necessary to get someone towards who it is targeted to read through it! That means someone who is not acquainted yet with the tool, because they will likely ask you questions if you start using terms that they never heard before, but are to you completely obvious.

Which is why I insist that having documentation in a reviewable (not necessarily requiring a review) repository, rather than a Wiki is an inclusiveness issue: it reduces the stress for newcomers, non-native English speakers, less aggressive people, and people who might not have gone to schools with debating clubs.

And at the same time, it reduces the risk that security-hole-enabling documentation is left, even for a little while, unreviewed but live. Isn’t that good?