ArchWiki:Contributing

Related articles
Help:Editing
Help:Style
The Arch Linux
Code of conduct
governs all Arch projects.
ArchWiki
strives to be a clear, comprehensive and professional model of documentation. In order to reach that goal we have to organize the job in a rational and functional way: this article tries to explain schematically what are the most important tasks you can give your help to accomplish.
This is a community effort, but if you take on the task seriously, a formal position as a
wiki maintainer
may be in order.
The 3 fundamental rules
There are 3 simple rules that all contributors, including novices, should try their best to follow as a sign of
respect
to the other users of the wiki:
Always properly use the edit summary
Do not make complex edits at once
Announce article rewrites in a talk page
.
All wiki contributors must assume and expect that other users will check their edits sooner or later, and respect their right to do so by making it as quick and easy as possible by following these rules. Those familiar with collaborative software projects will easily understand the analogy between wiki edit summaries and git commit messages, and between wiki edit diffs and git diffs.
Warning
Any edits to articles that do not respect these fundamental rules, and as such cannot be comprehended with reasonable effort, may be completely reverted without any other warnings, especially when affecting popular articles.
Always properly use the edit summary
The
edit summary
is the little text box that is found below the main editing area and just above the
Save changes
or
Save page
button. It is very important to always write, in a succinct way,
what
has been done and
why
. Note that
internal wiki links
do work in edit summaries, so use them to link to any related discussions or articles; similarly, paste any URLs to relevant edit diffs or external resources, such as forum threads or mailing lists.
Only in case of
minor
edits, e.g. grammar or orthography corrections or the simple rewording of a sentence, the
why
part can be omitted; analogously, starting a new
discussion
or replying to an existing one does not require to restate the message in the edit summary.
Tip
Consider clicking
edit
on a section header: in such case
/*
Section name
*/
gets prefilled in the summary field. It is not a comment syntax—the text between
/*
and
*/
gets turned into a link to a section of the page. Append your edit summary after it.
Take a look at the edit summaries in the
Recent Changes
to get an idea of what you should write in your summary, but be warned that unfortunately not all users are aware of these guidelines.
Use links like
Special:Diff/359881/next
for clickable references to diffs, see
mw:Help:Diff
for syntax details.
When you rename a section, mention both
/*
Old section name
*/
and
/*
New section name
*/
in a summary.
Do not make complex edits at once
If you want to make an extensive change to a page, be it a normal article or a discussion page, always split your work in several simple edits, for example according to the various logical steps needed to complete it. If in doubt, preview the resulting
diff
with the
Show changes
button and wonder if another user would be able to understand it, also considering the edit summary as explained above. Some common operations that generate confusing diffs are:
Moving a section in an article and at the same time editing its content. Solution: move the section unchanged, save, and change its content in a following edit.
Reordering several sections of an article at the same time. Solution: move only one section per edit.
Note
This practice will naturally increase the number of entries in
Special:RecentChanges
: do not be worried at all by this, users can easily filter that list by enabling the
Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist
setting under
Preferences > Recent changes > Advanced options
.
Announce article rewrites in a talk page
If you want to radically restructure or rewrite an article or a group of articles, announce and explain your intention in an appropriate talk page first, giving any other interested users some reasonable time to reply and share their view.
Keep in mind that announcing intended changes does
not
exempt edits from
#Always properly use the edit summary
and
#Do not make complex edits at once
.
The most important task
In the remainder of this article you will be presented with the various ways you can contribute to the wiki. Among them, however, there is one that you should consider far more important than the others:
add your favorite articles to your watchlist
and protect them against counter-productive edits.
Every day, ArchWiki receives
several dozens
of edits from many different users: while most of these changes are actual improvements, it only takes one single edit, often made in good faith, to inaccurately alter the meaning of a whole paragraph or a section, or sometimes even unreasonably delete it altogether; if gone unnoticed, this will ruin the valuable work that you and all the other previous editors had done. Unfortunately, this occurs more frequently than you would expect: the official wiki staff does try their best to filter and fix counter-productive edits, but you should never rely completely on them, both because, just like you, they have limited time to spend on the wiki, and also because they are not omniscient, and it is very likely that your knowledge on the topics treated in your favorite articles is greater than theirs. In general, a wiki simply does
not
work if users only focus on writing new content but then do not care about what happens to their contributions.
Fortunately, there is a very easy way for you to follow the articles to which you contributed or those that you like the most or are most knowledgeable in: at the top of every article there is a "watch" link, and by following it, that article will be added to
your watchlist
. You will then be able to follow the changes in
Special:Watchlist
, or by choosing to be notified by email when the watched articles receive updates in the "Email options" field of
Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal-email
; the pages you are following will also be highlighted in bold in
Special:RecentChanges
. Finally, preferences for the watchlist are found in
Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist
: among the options you can even choose to automatically start watching the pages that you create or edit.
If you notice that an article in your watchlist has received an inaccurate edit, or you just do not understand it, you are strongly encouraged to either fix it, if possible, or to start a discussion in the article's
talk page
, or in the responsible author's talk page. To keep up-to-date, you can configure web-/email notifications for talk topics via
Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo
.
Resources
Here is a list of pages that contain information needed for contributing:
ArchWiki Translation Team
has a step-by-step introduction for creating a new translation page. Follow it to translate pages to your own language.
Help:Article naming guidelines
discusses effective article naming strategies and considerations to ensure readability and improve navigation of the wiki. Read it before creating a new page.
Help:Category
explains how to set page categories, how to create missing category pages and how to move a page to a different category.
Help:Discussion
guides you on how to discuss with people in talk pages.
Help:Editing
outlines both widely-known MediaWiki markup and ArchWiki-specific guidelines. A must-read for any would-be contributors.
Help:i18n
serves as a comprehensive guideline for ArchWiki internationalization and localization.
Help:Procedures
is a collection of useful check lists for complex operations.
Help:Style
gives guidelines for the standardization of style in ArchWiki articles.
See
Category:Help
for all help articles.
Creating
Ensure you understand the philosophy of ArchWiki and think about what others may want to read (see
ArchWiki:Requests
for ideas). As mentioned, the wiki's scope is quite wide.
Talk to the
maintainers
for help coordinating major projects.
Help:Editing#Creating pages
covers the steps to create a new article in the main namespace.
The wiki's subpage feature (article/subpage) is available for your userpage as well. Using it you could create the draft on a blank subpage. Please note that userpage content must not be categorized, but all other features can be used. Once you have finished drafting, you can simply move the subpage to its new name. Please add relevant article status templates (only) after you moved it. The better you describe a status template's reason, the easier it is for users
#Improving
the wiki to collaborate with you.
Improving
Content editing, proofreading, and updating are never-ending tasks on any wiki. If you want to help, just register an account and start performing your magic.
Correct
inaccurate
or
outdated
content, spelling, grammar, language, and
style
.
Expand
incomplete
articles or tidy up
poorly-written
content.
Help fulfilling
requests
.
Non-Arch users
Anyone can
register an account
: non-Arch users are welcome to contribute content that applies to other Linux distibutions or operating systems, as long as they are confident that it also applies to Arch Linux. In particular, articles must be written specifically for Arch users, therefore:
do not add comments peculiar to other Linux distributions or operating systems; for example, a Fedora user contributing to the
systemd
page would be fine, but mentioning that the newly added content works on Fedora would be edited out as irrelevant;
do not replace mentions of Arch-specific conventions, terminology or utilities with alternatives that may apply to a broader range of operating systems.
Maintaining
Add your favorite articles to your watchlist and protect them against counter-productive edits—it is
the most important task
.
Help patrolling the
Recent Changes
, reporting and fixing
questionable edits
.
Flag articles with appropriate
status templates
, like
Template:Out of date
,
Template:Accuracy
,
Template:Remove
,
Template:Archive
, etc.
Participate in discussions in the various talk pages: most users will be interested in following the most recent posts to generic discussions at
this link
. Maintenance-specific posts are instead listed in
[1]
.
Organizing
Sorting, categorizing, and moving articles around has become a major task for all wiki maintainers implementing and improving the
category tree
.
Reduce and
combine
duplicate pages.
Improve wiki
navigation
.
Categorize
uncategorized pages
,
uncategorized categories
and
wanted categories
. See
Help:Style#Categories
and
Help:Style#Category pages
.
Fix
broken
and
double
redirects. Discuss or apply
proposed redirects
.
See
Special:SpecialPages
for other useful cleanup tools.
Translating
Add
or
improve
translations; ensure that translations are in sync with each other. Some languages have started collaboration projects (see list below) to efficiently organize the translation of the articles. Please consider joining your language's
Translation Team
or at least informing it when you are starting translating an article.
ArchWiki:Translation Team (العربية)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Català)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Čeština)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Ελληνικά)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Esperanto)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Español)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Français)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Hrvatski)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Magyar)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Bahasa Indonesia)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Italiano)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (한국어)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (正體中文)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Nederlands)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Polski)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Português)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Русский)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Slovenčina)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Türkçe)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (Українська)
ArchWiki:Translation Team (简体中文)
Some languages use external wiki, they may require different steps for translation.
Help:i18n
has a list of external wikis.
Special messages translation
There are some special messages used in Arch Wiki, please provide their translation for your language in the following link:
Also in (Message in Categories tree): Add translation
here
Talkpagetext: Add translation
here
Brainstorming
To coordinate contributions with other users in real time, there is an official dedicated
#archlinux-wiki
IRC channel. If unsure where to begin, or you feel awkward about editing other people's work, you may also contribute by posting ideas and suggestions at
Forum & Wiki discussion
section of the
Arch Linux Forums
.
Back-end maintenance
Use the
Arch Linux GitLab
to report bugs and contribute fixes and improvements for the ArchWiki back-end. The MediaWiki configuration is maintained in the
infrastructure repository
.
Complaining
If you have any
generic
negative remarks or complaints about how the wiki is moderated or administered, please leave a message in
ArchWiki talk:Maintenance Team
. Of course it should not be necessary to state that it is indeed possible to complain about something using a civil and respectful tone :)
All the appropriate places and methods for complaints and comments are outlined in
ArchWiki:Maintenance Team#Who, when and how to contact
.
Getting help
If you are in trouble—add a discussion topic on an appropriate page. We are ready to help:)
Another option is posting on
Forum & Wiki discussion
or in our
#archlinux-wiki
IRC channel
.
In case of account problems—contact
ArchWiki Maintenance Team
.