The Fedora Project Wiki has a very low barrier to entry for editors. (For more about wikis and the Fedora Project Wiki in particular, see the Wiki page.) However, there can be a small learning curve when beginning to use wiki, and we have a number of guidelines that all editors should follow. This page provides those guidelines and a few tips to help you get going.
This document is divided in three parts: gaining edit access, basic wiki editing, and more advanced editing.
Gaining Edit Access
In order to avoid malicious users defacing the Fedora Project Wiki, we have had to restrict edit access. To gain edit access to the wiki, you must follow a few simple steps. Anyone can gain edit access.
- Familiarize yourself with the information on this page and the pages that it links to. Basic guidelines that should be followed throughout the wiki are covered here. Failure to follow these guidelines creates unnecessary work for other volunteers and may result in revocation of editing privileges.
- Complete the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement through the Fedora Account System. Signing the FPCA gives the Fedora Project the ability to license your contributions to the wiki under our free license. This assures that your contributions will remain forever Free for the community to use, modify, and redistribute, just like the Fedora distribution. See our Legal section for more information. Follow the instructions at Infrastructure/AccountSystem/CLAHowTo.
- Get added to at least one other group in the Fedora Account System. See https://whatcanidoforfedora.org/ and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join to look for groups to contribute to. Many of them have their own process to follow before you are added to their group. Please look to joining the fedora-join mailing list fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/fedora-join@lists.fedoraproject.org/. [Due to large amounts of SPAM and defacements, changes to the wiki need to be done by community members .]
Information on writing new formal Fedora documentation using the wiki is available from Writing for DocBook using the wiki.
Etiquette guidelines
Refer to Help:Wiki rules and etiquette for some general etiquette guidelines on editing the Fedora wiki.
Creating pages
The Fedora Project Wiki is large, and so there is a need to maintain a proper hierarchy and organization. The best way to learn about these is to review Help:Wiki structure and Help:Categories, and then to review the existing layout of the wiki. Our guidelines will help you name your pages in a way that will help them be more readable, translatable, and easier for search engines to find and promote.
Editing with Mediawiki
Refer to Help:Wiki syntax and markup for basic information on how to write in MediaWiki syntax. It's really easy, and the wiki makes it easy for you to create a beautiful page with almost no markup at all.
Getting Help
If ever you have questions about editing the Fedora Project wiki, or if you need help, please feel free to contact the Websites team. They have an IRC channel called #fedora-websites[?] on freenode.net and a mailing list named websites that are both effective for getting the answers you need.
If you would like to do a lot of editing on the wiki, you should consider joining the Websites team.