Technical documentation
For the most up-to-date info, see my team’s page on mediawiki.org.
Important note: all of the following documentation is maintained in collaboration with the Wikimedia technical community. It may have been edited or completely changed by other contributors after I originally published it.
- Wikidata Query Service migration guide
- Wikimedia Developer Portal: a navigation tool for tech docs published across multiple wikis
- Wikimedia “LiftWing” ML Inference API docs and API migration user guide
- User help for two-factor authentication, and technical documentation for the related OATHAuth extension
- Intro to the Wikimedia Technical Ecosystem
- Intro to Wikimedia data for researchers
- Wikimedia Cloud Services Introduction
- Toolforge landing page and related documentation for Wikimedia Cloud Services.
I wrote a ton of documentation for the Ads Machine Learning team at Google, but it’s all top secret. Sorry 🙁
Research projects
- Technical documentation metrics
- Toolhub data model
- Developer portal user experience: summary blog posts on Diff and TechBlog
Published writing
Wikimedia Foundation blog posts
Burmeister, Tricia. “Illuminating Pathways to Technical Documentation” Diff Blog, Wikimedia Foundation, June 2022, diff.wikimedia.org/2022/06/15/illuminating-pathways-to-technical-documentation/.
- Blog post describing the personas and user journeys we used to build the Developer Portal information architecture.
Burmeister, Tricia. “New Discovery Tool for Technical Documentation”. Wikimedia TechBlog, Wikimedia Foundation, June 2022 . techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/06/15/new-discovery-tool-for-technical-documentation/
- Blog post describing the design principles and process behind building and launching a Developer Portal for improving discovery of technical documentation.
AIRS Newsletter Column – “InfoCommons”
For six months I wrote a bi-monthly column for the Alliance of Information & Referral Systems, the professional association for the field of information and referral (I&R). The goal of the column was to generate interest in and discussions about technology, social media, online tools, I&R software, user experience…and how we as practitioners could use IT to more efficiently do the work of connecting people to social services.
Conferences, presentations, and event organizing
- Let’s Get Free 2024 art show: “This Is Me”.
- View the show online: https://creative-resistance.org/this-is-me-art-show-2024/
- Hear podcast interview with WQED Voice of the Arts.
- WikiConference North America 2024: Catalog-a-thon for GLAM tools in Toolhub
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2024: Doc Your Tool: Creating user-friendly documentation
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2022: Documentation to Conquer the Dungeon
- Wikimania 2022:
- Organized a 2-day local meetup for Wikimedians to converge in Pittsburgh for Wikimania 2022 (the main conference was entirely virtual). Coordinated all event logistics, including space rentals, speakers, and group social activities for 8-12 attendees from Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC.
- Unconference presentation: “How I Built This: the Toolhub taxonomy”
- Grow with Google and google.org: 2017-2018:
- I held a 20% role as site lead for google.org initiatives in the Pittsburgh office. I coordinated a high-profile volunteer event with Google and Goodwill of Southwestern PA, for the Pittsburgh launch of Grow with Google.
- Recruited Google engineers to volunteer as Python instructors at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Since 2018, ~15 Googlers have volunteered as course facilitators, and over 150 students have completed the course.
- Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, 2016:
- Worked with local librarians, art historians, artists, and activists to organize a day-long Wikipedia editing event at the University of Pittsburgh, focused on increasing the representation of women artists. Applied for and coordinated grant funding from Google Pittsburgh to support the event.
- Press coverage: WESA; Pittsburgh City Paper
Coding and development
Technical documentation metrics generator: a Flask (Python) app I built for assessing Wikimedia technical documentation. The calculations are based on extensive research into which doc attributes are actually measurable. See:
- Web app: https://tech-doc-metrics.toolforge.org/
- Code: https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/tech-doc-metrics
- Docs: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Documentation/Tools/Metrics_generator
See my technical contributions to Wikimedia projects: : https://techcontribs.toolforge.org/uid/triciaburmeister
Library school writing and projects
Academic papers (unpublished):
Blog posts:
- Experimental back-of-the-book index to images of Greek vases. It’s discussed in this post.
- Essay about indexing local / community newspapers
- Annotated bibliography of reference resources on ancient Greek (and some Roman) art and archaeology
- Back of the book index for a junior-high level science text
- Website created for a class presentation/instruction session on oral history resources
- Book review written for a course on library services to older adults