Improve the Knowledge Base
Revision Information
- Revision id: 168179
- Created:
- Creator: TheTechKid
- Comment: Removed link to introduce yourself forum post as it is locked
- Reviewed: Yes
- Reviewed:
- Reviewed by: AliceWyman
- Is approved? Yes
- Is current revision? No
- Ready for localization: No
Revision Source
Revision Content
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.
Table of Contents
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:
- You can 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.
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
The most common thing we do in the glamorous world of Knowledge Base maintenance is to try to improve the articles we already have. 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.
Complete list of article writing documentation
If you're really interested in editing and writing documentation, here are a few resources that should help explain how we do things:
- About the Knowledge Base — is an overview of the mechanics of our Knowledge Base (for example, prioritization and scheduling).
- Writing guide for Knowledge Base articles — is a guide to writing techniques and styles that we use to make articles more engaging and effective.
- When and how to use keywords to improve an article's search ranking — explains when adding keywords to an article is appropriate.
- How to make screenshots — is a step-by-step guide to creating screenshots to use in articles.
- Add images and screenshots to Knowledge Base articles — explains how to add screenshots to articles.
- Add images and screenshots to Knowledge Base articles — explains how to get screenshots and other images to display correctly in articles.
- Markup chart — is our wiki markup reference. It gives examples and shows the markup that produces them.
- How to use {for} — this is the special wiki markup that lets us show instructions for different application versions (for example, Firefox 40) and operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS.
- Using Templates — templates are reusable pieces of content. You can include a complicated set of step-by-step instructions in multiple articles by using a template.