GitLab Technical Writing, 23 Jun 2020

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From YouTube: GitLab Documentation Content Audit

Description

Craig Norris talks about the recent audit of our documentation site (https://docs.gitlab.com/).

A

Hi, my name is Craig Norris I am a manager of the technical writers here at gate. Lab I just recently started my job.

A

You know back at the beginning of April in 2020 and noteworthy fact, my manager, you know Susan tacker, also started at the beginning of April, and while we were both trying to familiarize ourselves with with our new role, we we realized, we had an excellent team, but we really didn't know exactly what content that we had, and so one of the first things that we did is we sat down and did an audit of the content that we have that's available on Doc's, Tucket, lab comm and from that particular audit we found some.

A

You know very interesting information that you know I'd like to share through this particular audit. You know we put the information together that allowed us to be able to just you know, find out what exact files do we have. You know what some information about those particular files, including you, know, titles. You know, subject areas even things like how big or how many words do they have. What's the reading level of the content that are on the pages? How often are these pages viewed from Google Analytics and we put together some?

A

You know interesting information about those those pages. Most of our content happens to the pages that are stored in the lab repo. However, noting from this particular chart, we have other repositories, omnibus runner in charts. We have a lot of pages that are actually simple, 301 redirects, which you know our method is we actually have to have a physical page in order to be able to do the redirect? Why is that? We have a you know: a legacy application integration.

A

You know issue, that's preventing us spring from being able to get away from having discrete redirect pages, which is then inflating our you know, page count, and so that's one of the things that we're looking at you know with removing the slash help dependency. You know within the doctor with the documentation application. You know always things to do another thing that we've end up. That is, there's approximately 1600 pages that make up all of that of those 1600 pages.

A

We have about 1.2 million words within the get lab product documentation, whether that be content or whether that be instructions, but it's still, you know markdown instructions which are still things that we, you know care about. What does that translate to that approximately 24 standard novels or a little over two copies of war and peace now the nature of those is, is that war and peace or a novel are written once we are maintaining this information on a regular basis.

A

You know so much so that looking at our content, audit content, edits of the content and the images, so the text and the images over half of that information has actually been touched at some point this year. You know we have other.

A

You know we have older information that we would like to be able to ensure that we update more frequently, but you know we're touching a lot of that information regularly and then a final thing that I just kind of wanted to point out the reading level of our content using the flesh Kincaid, you know readability assessment, which was created to evaluate training manuals, so we figure that that mapped relatively well to product documentation shows that we have a reading level of approximately ten point, seven, which translates to about an 11th grade reading level in u.s.

A

the US educational system, noting that you know most most people in the US have really only a seventh to eighth grade reading level, and you know is something that we would like to try to address in order to make our documentation, you know more accessible to more people, as well as to people who have English as a Second, Language or you know, don't primarily speak English. So these are all things that we've evaluated as part of our review of the content. Are we done? We are not.

A

We are very interested in learning more about product documentation and how you know how people interact with it and what we can do to improve it, but we figured this is a good start and will help us. You know, make some good initial decisions as we move forward and make our documentation better. Thank you very much and hope that you have a great and wonderful day thanks very much.