# ArchWiki:Contributing

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.

Note: Always use the Edit Summary when editing articles, see Help:Style#Edit summary. If you intend to perform large changes that involve several articles, please discuss your plans first in an appropriate discussion page.

## Prerequisites

Here is a list of pages contain information needed for contributing.

- Help:Article naming guidelines discusses effective article naming strategies and considerations to ensure readability and improve navigation of the wiki. Read it before creating any new page.
- Help:Editing outlines both widely-known MediaWiki markup and ArchWiki-specific guidelines. A must-read for any would-be contributors.
- Help:Discussion guide you how to discuss with people in the talk page.
- Help:Style gives guidelines for the standardization of style in ArchWiki articles.
- Help:Category explain how to set page category, how to create missing categories pages and how to move a page to a different category.
- 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:i18n serves as a comprehensive guideline for ArchWiki internationalization and localization.

See the help category for all help articles.

## Easy to start jobs

Here are some easy jobs you can start with before moving to more difficult ones.

### Fix double redirects

1. Read this section to understand what redirects are.
2. Check out Special:DoubleRedirects to see if there are any.
3. For example, if you see `Pastebin Clients (Edit) →‎ Common Applications →‎ List of applications`, it means Pastebin Clients redirects to Common Applications, and Common Applications redirects to List of applications. Therefore, Pastebin Clients is a double redirect.
4. To fix it, edit Pastebin Clients and change `#REDIRECT [[Common Applications]]` to `#REDIRECT [[List of applications]]` to skip the middleman.
5. Enter an edit summary such as `Fixed double redirect` and save.

### Use internal links

Replace external links that point to the ArchWiki by internal links.

- list of http links
- list of https links

## 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 admins for help coordinating major projects.

## 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.

- Help fulfilling requests.
- Add content to stubs and expand incomplete or poorly-written articles.
- Correct inaccurate or outdated content, spelling, grammar, language, and style.
- Update the FAQ with relevant questions from the forum and remove obsolete questions.

## Maintenance

- Help patrolling the Recent Changes, reporting and fixing questionable edits.
- Flag articles with appropriate article status templates, like `{{Deletion}}`, `{{Out of date}}`, `{{Accuracy}}`, etc.
- Add some articles to your watchlist and protect them against counter-productive edits.
- 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], [2], [3] and [4]; furthermore, ArchWiki:Requests is used as a talk page despite its namespace.

## 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.
- 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
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Español)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Hrvatski)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Italiano)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Polski)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Русский)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (日本語)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (简体中文)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Ελληνικά)
- ArchWiki Translation Team (Català)

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

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 Bugtracker to report bugs and contribute fixes and improvements to the MediaWiki codebase. See the list of reported bugs for the ArchWiki back-end.

## Complaining

Yes, even generic complaints, if made in a civil manner, are a way to help improving the wiki! Please use ArchWiki:Complaints for that purpose.

Category:

- ArchWiki