This wiki was set up based on a documentation initiative thread posted on the XeTeX mailing list, specifically: this one.
We all know different bits about XeTeX and XeLaTeX, so this effort is necessarily going to be a concerted one, rather than relying on a single person or even a small group of people to write a nice user manual and reference work.
As such, anyone who feels they can contribute is perfectly free to do so, and all you need to do is set up a user name and get cracking. The documentation as a whole will from time to time be subjected to an editorial process, to make sure it's all roughly the same tone, and text will be checked to make sure it matches the level of detail the section it's in required, but mostly this will be a concerted effort by the following people (and if your name isn't in this list, simply edit this section).
The focus of this documentation initiative is primarily XeLaTeX, but that doesn't mean we should ignore core XeTeX at all. If you don't use XeLaTeX but have mastered the dark art of working in plain TeX, with your preferred weapon of choice being XeTeX, your contributions are going to be invaluable too. The document structure will probably never be really “fixed” (although it's certainly going to change a lot at first, and much less so later on) so if you feel plain XeTeX deserves a more prominent place, then raise the issue on the mailing list and it's actually a fair bet we'll accommodate you.
A small policy before jumping to the content: while it is inevitable that some of the basic LaTeX things will be repeated, and some of the material from package-specific manuals is rehashed because they are used so frequently that people will benefit from a concise explanantion on how to use a package, we don't want to end up with a document that's basically every manual rolled into a single document. As such, some guidelines:
In addition to the standard dokuwiki syntax this wiki has the font family
plugin installed, which lets you put stretches of text in serif/sans-serif/etc (any CSS font family will work):
Standard text, with <ff serif>serif marked</ff> text, and some ''monospaced'' text, which looks like:
Standard text, with serif marked text, and some monospaced
text.
This is a tentative suggested structure, and further discussion will probably make it far, far more detailed.
Some overlap with standard latex works cannot and should not be avoided.
I think those are the two major topics of multilingual discussion on the mailing list, but if someone things there should be more, then there should be more.
Some overlap with standard latex works cannot and should not be avoided.
This should include the latex commands. Yes, that's duplication, but someone new to using xelatex simply needs this section; all the information should be in one place on this one.
This part should be different from the explanantion in the package writing section - it should be pure reference. command name, one or two sentence explanation, next item.
The usual stuff
Several people have pitched in on the format in which this documentation should be available, and it seems that sticking with three types makes the most sense: