MDN/Get involved/Editing on MDN

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Report a problem

Documentation

Notice a minor problem in documentation? Good news: anyone can edit the MDN! To get started, just click Edit on the article you want to edit.

Software

Notice a problem with the underlying software? Have an idea for a new feature? Please share your thoughts on Bugzilla.

Contribute

Join the MDN community

Writing documentation

Anyone can edit the MDN. To get started, just click Edit on the article you want to edit.

Do you want to help with more than a few minor edits? Are you excited by the idea of thousands of web developers reading your work? Great! There are many ways to get involved.

Editorial review

One thing beginners can look into is doing editorial reviews. Editorial review is checking the content for spelling and grammar mistakes and the likes -- correction of prose, grammar, or content.

Check the list of articles/pages that need editorial review.

Once you complete the review/correction of a page and you are satisfied with it, you can uncheck "Editorial" in the "Review Needed" section at the bottom of the page and then save it.

Technical review

If you have good understanding of some topic, you can do technical review of content related to that topic. But make sure you are knowledgeable in the topic before doing technical review/corrections. When in doubt, always ask and/or get clarified before doing technical.

Check the list of pages that need technical review.

Adding code samples

Programmers like writing code more than writing text, so this one is fun! Say there is an article about the CSS property called border-radius and it doesn't have any examples of how to use that particular property. You can add code samples for it. It's really cool -- you get to play around with simple code and you get to display it on MDN. To see what I meant, see the "Examples" section in the border-radius page.

If you can think of another creative use of border-radius not listed in the examples section, go ahead and add it there.

Even better, write examples for features (HTML elements, CSS properties, JS APIs, etc.) that don't have any yet. Look at the list of pages that need live samples and pick one that seems interesting.

  • Tip 1: Write minimal code when writing examples.
  • Tip 2: Make sure the sample works!

Tagging

Another simple, but important thing to help with is tagging of articles. The task is to read/skim through articles and adding relevant tags to the page. Tags help improve the search and discovery mechanism in MDN. What good is a piece of documentation if it can't be found when needed, right? So this is way more important than this sounds. More on tagging can be found on the Tagging standards page.

There are other ways you can contribute too. It is highly recommended to read through the MDN editor guidelines if you are planning to make serious edits.

Translating articles

Want to help us translate the MDN into other languages? Great! Follow these simple steps to get started.

  1. Sign up. Visit the MDN and click Sign in near the top-right of the screen.
  2. Visit the article that you want to translate.
  3. Click Languages near the top-right of the screen.
  4. Choose the language you want to translate to, or click Add translation.
  5. Write your translation and save!
  6. We would love to help you. Follow the steps in the Writing documentation section to introduce yourself.

Developing software

Want to help with MDN development? Please see our developer contribution page.