Contributing to the Polkadot Wiki

The wiki was started and is maintained by the Web3 Foundation. It is an open-source project and aims to be the most extensive knowledge resource on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. Much of the material currently focuses on Polkadot and Kusama directly, but is open to covering informational material for community projects.

Marketing material

Please do not try to pull request any marketing material as this will be rejected.

Nonetheless, pull requests, discussions, and contributions from the community are encouraged. Active community members who demonstrate a record of good contributions may be given write access to the repository.

Otherwise, the Web3 Foundation holds the administrative position and has the final say on the included content. Specifically, the foundation’s Technical Education team is most directly involved.

Contributing Explainer

Check out the How to Contribute to the Polkadot Wiki video for steps on contributions.

How to Contribute

You can contribute to the wiki on the w3f/polkadot-wiki GitHub repository. Every page is a MarkDown file, which is an easy-to-learn syntax extension to plain text that makes creating links, rendering images, and nice-looking formatting simple.

Each page has an "Edit this page" link at the bottom of the content. By clicking it, you are taken to the GitHub sign-in page, where you can either log in or create an account.

Once logged in, you'll be taken to the GitHub built-in text editor, where you can make your edits directly. When you've completed your changes, you can add any specific details on what was changed and commit to a new branch to create a new Pull Request to the repository. From there, one of the maintainers will review your changes and either merge them or request changes.

Remember that after you click "Propose Changes", you must also click on "Create Pull Request" on the next page.

Ground Rules for Contributing

There are a few basic ground rules for contributors:

1. No --force pushes or modifying the Git history in any way.
2. Pull requests are preferred to issues, especially for small changes such as typos. Issues should be used for generic or broad-based changes or missing content. Suggestions and requests are encouraged.
3. Only use non-master branches.
4. Significant modifications, even by contributors, ought to be subject to a pull request to solicit feedback from other contributors.
5. Pull requests to solicit feedback are encouraged for any other non-trivial contribution but left to the contributor’s discretion.
6. Contributors should adhere to the prevailing MarkDown style, language, and layout.
7. Correct grammar should be used at all times. Pull requests with typos will not be merged until fixed.
8. Care should be taken to remain as objective and informative as possible. There should be no editorializing, and external bias should not be present.
9. We use the Prettier plugin to standardize the style across documents. You can run this on your local copy with npx lint-staged, but for simplicity, we also have a bot that runs this for us in your PRs.

Style Guides

Wiki General Style Guides

The style guide from the Substrate Knowledge Base provides general guidelines about how to write your Wiki contribution. See also the Wiki readme file.

The Polkadot Wiki is powered by Docusaurus. Docusaurus 3 was a major version upgrade that caused MDX errors. As a general rule, avoid using curly brackets and special characters. If you must use them, for example, to get the <-> symbol, you can escape the error with a \.

Following the Docusaurus 3 upgrade, conditional rendering has been disabled for Kusama and system chains. The previously used code for conditional rendering can be accessed here. Although Docusaurus 3 can support conditional rendering, due to practicality, we encourage using Tabs and TabItem formatting if you need to display text for different chains.

Avoid using exclamation marks ! and informal sentences, which are usually more appropriate for blog posts. Running a grammar check before submitting your pull request for review can save reviewers time and speed up the review process.

To ensure consistency across pages, note the following general terms:

• relay chain in text and Relay chain at the beginning of a sentence.
• parachain in text and Parachain at the beginning of a sentence.

The Polkadot Wiki has multiple moving parts. To ensure your contribution does not introduce compilation errors and that your page is properly rendered in production, we encourage you to build and render the Wiki on your local machine before submitting a pull request for review. Rendering the Wiki locally also adds the benefit of checking for broken links.

Render the Wiki Locally

The Polkadot Wiki is built from the source files in this GitHub repository. The Wiki uses Algolia search, which can be accessed locally by providing the correct App ID and API key. The app_id and api_key environment variables are needed to build the Wiki successfully. If you are an external contributor, set the variables with some values like shown below, which lets the Wiki repo build successfully (but disables the search bar).

export app_id="xxxxxx" api_key="xxxxxxx"

After cloning the source locally, you can start the website with the commands below (ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies).

Using yarn, run:

yarn install

Then you can build the Wiki:

yarn polkadot:build

And finally, you can start the Wiki:

yarn polkadot:start

Rendering On-chain Values

The Polkadot Wiki can render chain state values via RPC as shown here and display them directly in the docs without the need to recompile or even reload the web app. The rendering of on-chain values is reserved only in the Chain State page.

See the example for a react component below:

<RPC network="polkadot" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue="400"/>

Where network can be set to polkadot, kusama, statemint (Polkadot Asset Hub), statemine (Kusama Asset Hub), polkadotpeople, and kusamapeople. The path is composed by:

• query or const
• pallet and call

The example above shows the path to query the number of validators within the staking pallet. For more information, see pallets and extrinsics. The defaultValue is the value the react component shows if there is an issue with fetching data on-chain. A filter flag is also available to make values human readable, covert block number to days, etc.

Heritage

This document is based on the Level contribution guidelines.