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Contacts

• Mailing list: bf-docboard (Registration required).
• IRC channel: #blenderwiki on irc.freenode.net (further details about using IRC).

Editing guidelines

Editing rights

You don’t need to ask for editing rights, since we use a Captcha system to verify that registration has been made by humans and not bots.

Just create a mediawiki account and reply to the confirmation mail to get the right to edit this wiki.

Mediawiki syntax

Please refer to the official MediaWiki Docs.

Style, templates and translations

• Please follow the style guidelines.
• Learn these templates, and try to use them as much as possible: this will help wiki maintainers change the wiki quickly, instead of editing many pages.
• If you are localizing the wiki, follow the internationalization guide.

Spelling and Grammar

• Where possible please use American spelling and grammar rules when editing and creating wiki content. So for example it is "color" not "colour", "organization" not "organisation".
• For API, Scripting and other programming language content, you should also follow the Americanized spelling rules where practical.

Contents

Wiki structure

• Put the appropriate content in the appropriate sections.
• Please refer to this wiki structure.

User pages

• User pages are located at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:<username>

For example, if your user nickname in this wiki is "MyUserNick", then your user space is User:MyUserNick

• Once you login, you can find the link to your user page in the user menu in the page header.
• In your user page, you’re free to add anything you want related to blender and to yourself (check allowed contents below).

Allowed contents

• Write only about contents directly and clearly related to Blender. Other contents only tangentially related should be hosted elsewhere:
  • Content on using Blender is good.
  • Broader research and technical information should go elsewhere.
• If you’re unsure, use the contacts listed above.
• Please avoid spamming with links to commercial sites, even in your user page: you might be banned for that.

Official Manual Review Workflow

If you noticed a typo, some minor error, anything you can fix in 1 minute or less, just do it, thanks!

For major editing and bug fixing, please follow the workflow outlined below.

About Review notes

The manual is under ongoing review: when a page has problems, wiki reviewers add a review note listing the page problems/bugs. All the review notes are automatically collected in a big table so that everyone can examine the manual status and pick up some work to do. Also, wiki admins, wiki reviewers, and developers can easily add a new page in the Manual structure after examining Release notes, and mark it as "empty", and then wait for volunteers to help out writing the needed manual page. If nothing happens, at least we won't lose track of what's needed.

How to contribute to an existing page

If you want to help out, please follow the guidelines below.

In a nutshell

If you want to fix a bug in a certain manual page, you have to:

• prepare the proposed change in your user space,
• link the fix pages in the page status panel
• wait for a review
• after approval, commit your change as explained below
• Note well: If you do big change without asking, your edits might be reverted.

Example

Say that in [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]] you find a note like:

Page status (reviewing guidelines) Text needs verification that it's up to date with 2.6 Proposed fixes: none

and you want to help fix that bug.

Copy the wikitext from [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]] in [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]], edit it until you're happy with the result, then save it.

In [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]]:

• link your fix in the review note by typing:

{{review|text=needs verification that it's up to date with 2.6|fixes=[[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo|X]]}}

• this will show up as

Page status (reviewing guidelines) Text needs verification that it's up to date with 2.6 Proposed fixes: X

Wait for a review: wiki reviewers will be able to see your suggestion in the general review page and will contact you using your talk page.

When you get a go:

• copy/paste the wikitext from [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]] to [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]]
• remove the bug from the Page Status note
• save, with an explanatory summary
• to clean up your user space, redirect [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]] to [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]]

How to redirect Substitute the wikitext in [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]] with #REDIRECT [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Foo]]

How to propose a new page

Say you want to propose the new page [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]]:

• write your new content in [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]]
• get a positive review :)
• ask an admin to move [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]] to [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]], OR
• create [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]], and redirect [[User:YourNick/Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]] to [[Doc:2.6/Manual/Bar]] (as explained above)

How to propose a new Manual structure

As a general advice, the current Manual structure has been discussed at length by wiki admins and, also for technical reasons, it's not always easy to change it radically. We really need your help completing the manual pages, rather than help changing the manual structure again :)

Still, if you feel to propose a change to the manual index:

• first off, have a chat with wiki admins about it
• if still needed, prepare a mockup of the proposed structure in your user space
• discuss this document in docboard or in IRC

Collaboration

Messages to other wiki users

You can leave a message for another wiki user by writing a message in their Talk page.

In their user page, click on the link labeled “Discussion” and leave the message.

When that user logs in to this wiki they will see the new message in their talk page.

How to sign

In order to put your signature on a page you can type a series of tilde. Depending on the number of “~” you will get different things:

--~~~

results in “--your username”.

--~~~~

results in “--your username 12:34, 1 February 2008 (UTC)”.

--~~~~~

results in “--12:34, 1 February 2008 (UTC)”.

While editing a page you have a list of symbols just under the editing area: for fast signing, just copy-paste the sign symbols “(--~~~~(Sign))” from there.