Maintainership for Documentation pages and sections

Created on 4 September 2014, over 10 years ago
Updated 25 March 2025, 12 days ago

Problem/Motivation

We would like to introduce the concept of Community Documentation pages (and sections, which would include child pages, grandchild, etc.) on Drupal.org having "maintainers".

People who want to maintain documentation pages/sections would have tools to track updates to those pages/sections. They would also get recognition on their user profiles, which is important for motivation/resume/etc.

Proposed resolution

(a) Documentation pages would need a button that would say something like "Sign up to maintain this page", and a section in the sidebar listing all the people (link to d.o profile) who have signed up as maintainers.

(b) This should also trigger notifications to the maintainers when pages in the section are updated substantively. [This assumes that we have a way to mark a revision as "substantive" vs. "minor".]

(c) Maintainers need a dashboard page where they can see pages they maintain and when they have last been updated and by whom. It would be great if this was also visible on their user profile, similar to projects they maintain.

(d) In the Maintainers area on the docs page sidebar, we need to make clear that everyone is still encouraged to edit pages -- the maintainers are just overseeing the edits (short description with link to a longer page explaining what the responsibilities are).

Remaining tasks

Figure out how to do this, and do it.

User interface changes

As described in Proposed Resolution.

API changes

Revisions will have a way to be marked as "substantive" vs. "minor".

Feature request
Status

Postponed: needs info

Component

Docs infrastructure

Created by

🇺🇸United States yesct

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  • docs infrastructure

    Infrastructure/code improvements related to documentation. The Core Documentation team uses this tag.

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  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    What remains to be completed here?

  • 🇮🇹Italy apaderno Brescia, 🇮🇹

    The Sign up to maintain this page button described in point a of Proposed resolution has never been implemented. Every person with the community role can edit documentation pages (except some sections), but people cannot add themselves as maintainer of documentation guides.

  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    "sign up to maintain this page" - How would that work? Is that automatic or is there some process to follow?

  • 🇮🇹Italy apaderno Brescia, 🇮🇹

    Basing on the description, it is a submission button with a custom submission handler which adds the currently logged-in user to the list of people who signed up as documentation maintainers.
    Since the used verb is sign up, I am not clear if that means there is a list of people who is willing to be maintainer somebody else will approve, or people who "sign up" are automatically added as maintainers. In both the cases, custom code must be written.

  • 🇺🇸United States joshuami Portland, OR

    The conversation around has shifted a lot in the last 10 years. I would argue that just signing up, without some sort of approval process, will result in spam of some sort. Much of this conversation and the original issue was before we implemented all of the user confirmation workflow to reduce spam.

    There might be a path to allowing confirmed project maintainers to sign up automatically or perhaps better would be for a documentation maintainer request to be sent to the project maintainer for approval.

    I doubt there is bandwidth for the development of either, but @hestenet might have some ideas.

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