Contributing content to WPD

Anyone can contribute to WPD. To get started, you'll first need to register and verify your email address. There are many ways to contribute that take varying amounts of time and expertise. Often it's best to start with the simplest, fastest tasks and progress upwards from there as you gain expertise and experience. You can make meaningful contributions whether you have five minutes, half an hour, or half a day.

The community is friendly and welcoming to newcomers; if you ever have any questions, just ask the community on IRC or e-mail!

Tasks

Tasks provide you with a way to roll up your sleeves and contribute; these take varying amounts of time and expertise. Often it's best to start with the simplest, fastest tasks and progress upwards from there as you gain expertise and experience. You can make meaningful contributions whether you have five minutes, half an hour, or half a day.

For specific things to do, take a look at our WPD Most Wanted page, which is a place to record the things that most need doing right now. This will be added to as time goes on.

Want to create a new tutorial or concept page, or edit an existing one? Find a thorough guide at Tutorials and Concept articles.

Want to create a new reference page, or edit an existing one? Find a thorough guide at Reference articles.

5-minute tasks

Correct grammar and spelling mistakes Pages with the grammar flag checked need some attention to fix grammar and spelling mistakes. Often these changes require no knowledge of MediaWiki or web development domain expertise to help with, which makes them great starter issues to focus on. See for more information.
Filling in missing compatibility information Some pages have compatibility tables with missing cells, which you can find on this list. Generally the information can be verified by comparing a couple of other sources (such as http://caniuse.com/) and then inputting the values in the form.
Data not semantic On Web Platform Docs, we use Semantic Media Wiki and Semantic Forms to organize information in a structured way. Sometimes, however, data is represented on a page in an unstructured field. Often it's as simple as moving bits of content from one text box to another. The Data Not Semantic flags page has more information.
Biased content WPD is supposed to be a vendor-neutral documentation site, so efforts need to be made to remove biased information. For example, have you found a section that talks about a feature as if it is only usable in a certain browser, or a section of code that could work across all browsers, but won't because it only uses one or two browsers' vendor prefixes? Please amend these accordingly, or at least check the Biased Voice flag in the edit form.
Setting appropriate flags If you press the edit button at the top of an article, you can check the different flag checkboxes at the top of the edit form to indicate what tasks need to be done on that article.
Fixing broken links Broken links are fairly easy to spot on WPD - they should be highlighted in a bold red colour. Please repair any you find, or at least check the Broken Links flag.
Add more useful links Feel free to add useful, relevant links to external resources to show more examples to illustrate a technique or technology.
Add the correct code syntax coloring to code blocks See our code coloring guide for details of how.
Watch Recent Changes for improper changes It always helps to have someone keeping an eye on the Recent Changes list to help find cases where new editors might need a bit of guidance to contribute productively and according to the norms of the community.

Half-hour tasks

New examples It is always useful to add more examples to illustrate techniques or show good use of technologies. Look for articles where the examples are thin on the ground.
Incomplete API documentation Some reference articles are incomplete or need documentation fleshing out.
Merge duplicate articles Every so often there will be pages that substantially duplicate content and should be merged into one. For example, an article that originally came from MSDN might have lots of overlapping content with another article that came from HTML5Rocks. Look for articles on this list, then look in the editorial note at the top to find the other article they've been proposed to merge into. Often it just requires looking carefully through both articles to maintain the best of both without duplication. See WPD:Flags/Merge_Candidate for more information.
Fill in stubs There are a number of pages that are just stubs - article titles and locations with no content, usually as a result of someone thinking that it'd be a good idea to have an article on X or Y, but not having time right now, so setting a placeholder for later. Filling these in would be greatly appreciated.
Fill in exercise questions Some articles have exercise questions listed at the bottom of them - you can fill in useful exercise questions, in the Manual sections: (raw other sections, including headers) box of the See also section in the edit form for tutorials, guides, etc.
Add screenshots or supporting information Many articles have broken screenshot links, or notes such as Note: add screenshot to show what this should look like. in them. Please help out by adding needed screenshots, or further examples or supporting information to illustrate techniques.
Clean up imported content Some content that came from other sources originally needs help to clean it up, ensure it is complete, make sure it is associated with the correct other pages when applicable, and generally bring it up to snuff. You can find out more specifics by reading about the Unreviewed Import flag.

Half-day tasks

Merge articles Some articles are marked with the Merge candidate flag, meaning that they should be merged with other articles, perhaps because they duplicate information, or because they would work better as single entity.
Split articles - this is the same as above, except in the opposite direction.
Write new articles It is always great to see people writing new content. To find out what needs to be written, see the suggestion board. If you are not sure if something needs to be written, ask about it first, any of the methods documented on our Help page. If you haven't got time to write a complete article, it is still worth creating a new page with the beginnings of a new article on it.
Suggest new topics for inclusion If you have a good idea for an article that could be included but don't have the time or skills to write it yourself, it is still worth putting the idea forward. You can do this in a variety of ways — use any of the methods documented on our Help page.
Improve internal documentation If it took you time to figure out how to do something, consider writing up a guide so people who others can follow in your footsteps later.
Rewriting CC-BY-SA content for CC-BY use Content original to the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0) for maximum reusability. Some material on the site comes from other sources that have made it available under a share-alike license such as CC-BY-SA. If you see articles licensed like this, feel free to rewrite the content.

Editing an existing page

Editing an existing page is as easy as clicking the Edit button at the top of the page. Be sure you're familiar with the content types, architecture, and style guide before editing existing content or creating new content.

Content types

WPD supports three basic types of content:

Reference material -- A concise description of an entity and its components; for example, JavaScript APIs, HTML and CSS reference.
Tutorials -- Step-by-step instructions for building a sample application or demonstrating a feature.
Concepts -- Provides an overview of a feature or API.

Each of these content types has a unique URL name space--that is, where the page "lives". The URL generally follows the logical organization of the feature. For example, css/selectors/outline-style.

Architecture

For finding content, use search. You'll get the best results. For figuring out where to put new content, you'll need to get familiar with the architecture of this site.

Style guide

The style guide for this site describes the conventions we have adopted for things like capitalization, title and section headings. Please be familiar with these conventions as you edit site content.

Creating a new page

Great, you have an idea for a new page you want to create, and you've determined the canonical URL where the content should live. For details on how to choose your page's URL, see the architecture page. The next step is to use the New Page form to create your page from the proper template, and at the proper URL.

Steps for creating a new page

Go to the New Page page.
On that page identify the form to create the proper template (see #Choosing a content template).
In the form's text field enter the URL for the new page in the text field, and click Create Page.

For example, if you were creating a tutorial about a racing game, the URL might be /tutorials/racing_game (you would type in tutorials/racing game: the Wiki creates the underscores for you. Please do not use hyphens in urls unless grammatically appropriate, and use all lower case.).

Choosing a content template

The New Page page contains a form for each type of content you can create on the site. Each form consists of a text field where you enter the new page's URL and a button to create the page.

If you are creating a tutorial, use the Tutorial template.
If you want to describe a concept or feature, use the Concept template.
If you are creating a reference page, the template you select is determined by the kind of API/feature you are documenting, for example
- API Object Method for a method of an API/Object.
- CSS Property for a CSS property.
- etc.

The forms are listed in decreasing order of specificity. Identify the most specific form below that fits the type of content you'd like to create. For example

The basics

The technology

WPD is a site dedicated to documenting and teaching people about open web standards, those technologies standardized by the W3C, IETF, and other standardization bodies, which are created as part of an open process to be free for anyone to use, and not controlled by any one company. If you think that a technology is missing from WPD, please open a discussion about it using any of the methods documented on our Help page.

The norms

The WPD community is guided by a series of foundational norms that we call the WPD Pillars. The Pillars document is a list of guiding principles that informs the more mundane norms and processes that govern the day-to-day operations of the site. You should read them carefully, but what's most important to know is that WPD is founded on the idea that we should assume good faith cooperation and that we prefer norms over rules. These norms and rules are documented within the wiki itself, in the WPD namespace (to keep it separate from documentation content). You can find the more mundane norms listed at WPD:Policy.

Flags and editorial notes

WPD uses a system of flags and editorial notes to keep track of areas where improvements are required. when you choose to edit WPD pages, you should see a list of check boxes for the different flags available — use these to raise an alert that a specific type of improvement or attention is needed on a page.

References

Here are some references to help you:

Remember, if at any point you're unsure, ask the IRC channel or the e-mail list. We love helping new editors get the hang of things!

Bugs!

See Filing bugs

Sep	OCT	Nov
	27
2011	2012	2013

Personal tools

Search

WPD:Getting Started

Contents