Thanks for helping with our Knowledge Base. For millions of people around the world, these articles are the face of Mozilla when they have a problem or question about one of our products. Improving the Knowledge Base is the way to get the biggest bang for our collective effort. A single article can quickly help tens of thousands of people each week.

Here's how the process works in a nutshell:

Ready to begin? Here's a guide to all the training materials you'll need.

Create an account and say hello

As a nonprofit, open-source project, we rely on our community of volunteers to write and maintain the majority of the articles. You don't need special permission to work on them — this is a wiki that anyone can edit. All you need is an account. Once you've got one, the next thing you should do is say hello:

• Introduce yourself. We'd love to hear from you.
• You can also talk to us in the #sumo IRC channel (chat room). This is where Mozilla support contributors help each other. I'm "jsavage" in there. If you don't have an IRC program, you can connect with this web app.

Learn and practice

Now you're ready to familiarize yourself with the Knowledge Base. Here are some links to articles to help you get started.

Markup and style guides

• Articles are written in a special language called wiki markup before they are published with regular text. Learn more about wiki markup with the wiki markup chart.
• Learn how to use proper SUMO language and tone in this guide to writing Knowlege Base articles and this style guide.
• Our readers use different operating systems and versions of Firefox. Learn to use the "Show for" feature to show the right instructions for each operating system and version.
• Templates help us reuse content over and over again. Learn how to use templates.
• Learn how to create screenshots, how to add screenshots to articles and how to place images in an article to illustrate your article.

Prepare and practice

1. Get practice before you begin working on live articles. Learn about the staging site.
2. If you see something that can be better, show the article editing tools and then click Discussion and let us know what needs to be fixed or click Edit Article and make the change yourself. Learn about article discussion.

Get started writing!

Is there a topic we haven't covered? Here's the essential information that will help you create your first article:

• Anatomy of a Knowledge Base article – it's an article that explains the basics of how articles are built.
• Create a new Knowledge Base article – steps for creating a new article along with some sample wiki markup to get you started.
• Markup cheat sheet – the most commonly used wiki markup in our articles.

Help us improve existing articles

Improving the articles we already have is the most common thing we do year round. How do you know which articles need updates and edits? The Knowledge Base Dashboard will list them all.

• Find out more about the KB dashboard.
• Learn more about how to edit existing articles.

I've submitted a revision. What's next?

Our community reviewers will review your revision in the next week. If you'd like immediate feedback, email Joni Savage, Content Manager, at jsavage@mozilla.com.

Some articles get more visits than others and are treated different in the review process. Learn more about types of articles and Article review guidelines.