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Improve Zotero's Documentation

The Zotero project's success is anchored in its community. Community members help isolate bugs, guide development through feature requests, contribute styles and other pieces of code and also help improve Zotero's documentation. This page describes how you can get involved in improving Zotero's documentation.

Creating a Wiki Account

Zotero's documentation is a wiki, so just like the most famous wiki, Wikipedia, users can edit, add to, and enhance Zotero's documentation. If you would like to do so you will need a wiki account. To create a wiki account simply jump to the registration page and sign up. Note: Wiki accounts are distinct from your general Zotero account.

Three Documentation Sections

Before discussing how you contribute to the wiki you need to know a bit about the three general sections of the wiki, the knowledge base, general support and information for developers. The knowledge base, or all the articles found at support/kb, is a collection of short questions and answers, tangential issues, and other information that, while useful, is not directly applicable to every Zotero user. The brief, tangential nature of these articles make them a great place to start getting involved in documenting Zotero. If a question keeps coming up in the forums, start an article about it and link to it in future threads. The general documentation section contains core information about Zotero and its functions. You can think of this section as the sort of information you would find in the Zotero manual if there was such a thing. Any large-scale edits to the general documentation should be the result of community consensus. The Developers section of the wiki is a place for information on how Zotero and the technologies it uses work. If you are developing, extending or otherwise coding software to interact with Zotero, please consider contributing to the developer documentation.

Editing the Wiki

  • Logging in: To edit and create pages in the documentation wiki, you need to log in. You can log in to the wiki from any page by appending ?do=login to the pages URL. For example you can log in from the support homepage with http://www.zotero.org/support/?do=login
  • Editing a page: Once you are logged in, you will be able to edit pages, and view recent changes through a toolbar at the bottom of each support page. To edit the page, simply click the edit page button. A new window will appear with a large text field where you can edit the page. You can read up on the syntax for Zotero's wiki here: http://www.zotero.org/support/wiki/syntax
  • Creating a page: To create a new page simply type in the URL where you want your page to reside. If no page exists at that location, you will be told “This topic does not exist yet”. Click the “Create this page” button to create the page.
dev/writing_documentation.1229373259.txt.gz · Last modified: 2008/12/15 15:34 by ahoward