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Contributing to the Polkadot Wiki

The wiki was started and is maintained by Web3 Foundation. It is an open source project and aims to be the most extensive resource of knowledge on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. A large part of the material currently focuses on Polkadot and Kusama directly but it is not opposed 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, Web3 Foundation holds the administrative position and final say on the content that is included. Specifically, the Technical Education team at the foundation are 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.

contributing creating-pull-request

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

creating-pull-request-2

Guideline and 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 discretion of the contributor.
  6. Contributors should attempt to 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 a plugin called Prettier 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 which runs this for us in your PRs.

Heritage

This document is based on the Level contribution guidelines.