With the recent creation of the WordPress core-AI team, the documentation team is taking advantage of this opportunity to revamp the process for writing user documentation, or HelpHub articles – as it is known in the team.
The challenges of writing user documentation in WordPress
- Time-Consuming: Creating user documentation takes time, as the process is lengthy, sometimes features are updated even before its article is written.
- Lengthy process: The process includes learning about the features (new or those being updated) > writing the article > reviewing > correcting and waiting for the last release candidate to get accurate screenshots and videos > posting the article.
- Inconsistent Formatting: Even with a template and guidelines, formatting is still an issue. There are questions of when to use a screenshot vs. a video, or the size of the images.
- Keeping It Up-to-Date: Features change often, but sometimes the documentation is not updated because preference is given to new features.
- Lack of Contributors: The documentation team is not large and because the time constraint that exists during a release, the team falls behind in writing new articles or maintaining updated documentation.
- Missing opportunities: As far as I remember, the documentation team has been focused on WordPress version releases, missing entirely the Gutenberg releases that could help in maintaining updated documentation.
Project goals
The main goal of this project is to teach AI to write verifiable and specific user documentation without developer jargon.
It is important that AI, named ChatGPT or Gemini learn the WordPress language, the jargon and the style guides so every team can take advantage of it.
In the future, we hope that this new process is also useful for translators and anyone writing documentation.
The Proposal: Responsible AI workflow for creating new documentation for WordPress 6.9 in WordPress.org.
This work is part of the sponsorship by Kinsta to contribute to WordPress.