Help:Contribute

This page contains information about editing the KDE Community wiki, including what content belongs where and helpful tools specific to this wiki. Even if you are familiar with wikis, you should read the section on organisation to see what content should be put where on this wiki.

Before you Start

First Things First

• To contribute to Community you must register an account with the KDE Identity service, and then you can click the Log in link.

• Be aware that you must agree to your contributions to KDE Community Wiki being released under the licenses listed at KDE Community Wiki:Copyrights. These licenses mean that what you write might be copied to other sites, for example.

• Use the Talk pages to communicate with other contributors or get help. Normally someone will get back to you within a day.

Relevance

This wiki is for the KDE Community to coordinate and maintain information that is useful internally, as well as information useful for people who want to join the community. End-user documentation belongs on UserBase and documentation for developers wanting to use or extend KDE products belongs on TechBase. Information for developers who want to contribute to KDE products, however, belongs here.

More about this in the guidelines.

Organisation

This wiki is organised using subpages. This is a parent-child relation. For example, if we consider the Policies/Licensing Policy page, Policies is the parent of Licensing Policy and Licensing Policy is a subpage (or a child) of Policies

This structure is useful because it provides a hierarchical organisation in the URL itself, makes page names less likely to clash (for example, many projects will want similarly-named pages) and provides back links (in the above example, Policies/Licensing_Policy will contain a link back to Policies near the top).

Team pages

Pages for teams to coordinate should go under a page for that team. For example, the main page for the team that works on KWin is at KWin, and a page describing to new members how to get involved could be at KWin/Getting_Involved.

The main team page should be linked from the main page. Please carefully check that a page for your team does not already exist before adding it.

Common pages

Quite a bit of information is not team-specific, but is common to large parts (or all) of the community. Most of this will fit in one of the categories below, in which case it should go there. Otherwise, use your judgement (and don't be offended if it gets moved).

• Get Involved contains information for new contributors. Teams, particularly for software projects, may wish to have a "Get Involved" page in their own space as well.
• Policies contains rules that KDE projects and contributors are expected to follow
• Infrastructure contains information on the infrastructure that KDE provides for its members and projects, such as Git hosting, collaboration tools (from mailing lists to patch review), bug reporting systems and so on.
• Guidelines and how-tos contains helpful information for KDE projects, especially software projects, but (unlike Policies) KDE projects do not have to follow them. This includes recommendations on visual design, localisation and accessibility, for example, as well as help on how to do common tasks that are not specific to one team or project.

Formatting

• The main MediaWiki site has a Wiki syntax guide
• UserBase has some lists of formatting that can be a useful reference, including templates that are specific to the KDE wikis.
• Much of what applies to Wikipedia (except the templates) also applies here, including Wiki markup and their cheatsheet.

Wiki Maintenance

Maintaining a clean and useful wiki involves making sure content is up to date, there are no broken links, and all pages can be found (they are linked to from somewhere). The following special pages can help find issues that need fixing:

Issues which should be fixed as soon as possible

Special:Lonelypages

Special:BrokenRedirects

Special:DoubleRedirects

Issues which should be fixed in time

Special:Wantedpages

Special:Wantedcategories

You can also add a page to the Needs Attention to flag it for later work by adding [[Category:Needs Attention]] to the page. Using Template:TODO will also add a page to this category.

Deleting pages

Most users cannot delete pages on the Wiki - this is because once a page is gone, you cannot get it back. If you think a page should be deleted, mark it with Template:Proposed_deletion at the top:

{{Proposed_deletion|reason=this page contains only spam}}