[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

This is an old revision of the document!


Ideas for contributing to the SlackDocs wiki

Contributing to the documentation of a project can be a highly rewarding and satisfying task, but many potential contributors are daunted by the prospect of writing documentation. The idea behind a wiki is not to create perfect documentation from the outset but to engage the community in making incremental improvements and getting there in the end. Hence, there is no necessity to be fazed by the thought.

Each individual may pick and choose topics to contribute, which they feel they are likely to add knowledge to. Here are some areas which may be of specific interest to potential contributors.

Edit, Expand, Improve

Editing, expanding and improving existing articles is a great way to start contributing to a Wiki-style documentation. Being a collaborative project, any and all improvements and corrections are welcome.

Substantive writing

When you are confident enough to go beyond editing and improving existing articles, here are some ideas for substantive contributions to the wiki, in no particular order.

Technical HOWTOs/Tutorials

Technical HOWTOs for performing specific tasks or achieving specific results are much appreciated by the Linux community. Technical HOWTOs focus on a specific task and how to get it done, step by step, with explanations and illustrations. Technical HOWTOs are highly task-oriented and should provide code examples when necessary. Caveats, notes and warnings play an important role in such articles and help the reader figure out any potential gotchas.

Some examples of technical HOWTOs may be:

  • How to set up a wireless network.
  • How to set up a web/FTP/mail server.
  • How to configure an internet firewall for desktop use.

and so on.

Specific programs or applications

These are short, informative pieces on specific programs or applications. Bear in mind that these topics need not be man-page substitutes. However they may provide enough information for users to get started with and may expand to deal with particular features that may need explanations or answers.

This may include topics on desktop applications and package management tools, for example.

General articles

These are articles that do not target any specific technical issue but focus instead on larger issues. A general article needs no specific technical know-how to write, but may be expanded later to provide links or short pointers to in-depth sources of knowledge on the same or similar subjects.

An example of a general article is the one on Slackware philosophy.

 slackdocs:contributing ()