The Zotero project's success is anchored in its community. Community members help isolate bugs, guide development through feature requests, contribute program code and citation styles, and help write Zotero's documentation. This page describes how you can contribute to improving Zotero's documentation.

Zotero's main source of documentation is the Zotero wiki. Like with Wikipedia, any (registered) user can edit, add to, and enhance the wiki. To create a wiki account go to the wiki registration page and sign up (a wiki account is not the same as a Zotero account).

Before you start editing the wiki, familiarize yourself with its three principal divisions.

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. If you add a new article, be certain to add the “kb” tag at the bottom of the page, so the article is automatically added to the knowledge base:

{{tag>kb}}

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. Significant edits to the general documentation should be the result of community consensus.

The developers section of the wiki is 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.

• 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 that appears at the bottom of a page or section. 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.