Participating in the three-day Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon 2025 will remain an unforgettable experience for me—one that re-emphasized the power of open knowledge, teamwork, and documentation. While other participants chose to focus on coding and design, I took a different path: technical documentation.
Technical documentation is often an underestimated aspect of open-source projects. Good documentation of a tool or process can mean the world to both end users and developers. Here’s the catch—the code builds the foundation, but documentation scales and sustains the project. As a junior developer, I know this better. My team task at the hackathon was to create user documentation for the Page Collection Report, a tool that uses a list of Wikimedia pages to extract important information and organizes it in a way that is easy to read.
One of the most exciting aspects of the hackathon was working alongside other technical writers, including newbies. I was unanimously chosen to be the team lead under the mentorship of Tricia Burmeister (WMF). The synergy and effective communication within the team turned our mere ideas into structured resources. This experience proved to me that tech doc isn’t just about writing; it’s about creativity, clarity, and long-term impact.
By the end of the hackathon, the documentation we worked on was published on a subpage in my personal user page, pending review and integration by the tool developer, Santhosh Thottingal. Additionally, I also helped to strengthen localization efforts on translatewiki by translating messages from English to my native language, Igbo. Many thanks to the hackathon organizing team; I definitely look forward to more iterations of this, bigger and better!
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation