Help:Contribute

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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 (e.g. via APIs), or:

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)

More on this on the guidelines on community.kde.org

Organisation

noframe

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}}