Help:Contribute
This page contains information about editing the KDE TechBase 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 TechBase you must register an account with the KDE Identity service, then activate it on Phabricator by logging in there, and then you can click the Login with Phabricator link on the sidebar to log in.
- Be aware that you must agree to your contributions to this wiki being released under the licenses listed at KDE TechBase: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 documentation for developers wanting to use or extend KDE products. This includes:
- overview information for libraries, including the advantages of using them
- tutorials and examples for using libraries
- tutorials, examples and documentation for writing plugins and other extensions to libraries and applications
- IPC/RPC interfaces for software, like DBus interfaces
End-user documentation belongs on UserBase, and things directed at contributors, teams and the KDE Community in general belong on the community wiki. Examples of things that don't belong on TechBase include:
- documentation on how to use an application
- code style policies
- information for new contributors
- team coordination (TODO lists, meeting notes, etc)
- notes on the internal architecture of a piece of software (but the architecture of a library's API does belong)
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).
| TODO |
|---|
| need to document the structure |
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}}