Scribus Wiki Contributor Manual

Where to start
This article is intended for those members of Scribus community who would like to contribute their efforts to helping other members of the community use Scribus effectively by providing helpful documentation. The roles of contributors, editors, and moderators are not clearly defined as the wiki is intended to be a living structure, growing and developing in the direction that helps all of us. Whatever role you would like to take at least at first, your initial step would be to send a request for an account. Once you receive your account data by email please log on and change your password if necessary. You are advised to get acquainted with the Mediawiki User's Guide. However, it is likely that the information within this article can be sufficient to get you started until you are ready for more advanced editing actions. Those pages that require urgent attention usually have examples of the formatting code you might want to learn and improving them would bring an immediate benefit to the community. You are also welcome to go to the Special Pages section and look through uncategorized, orphaned, unlinked, and otherwise abandoned pages that you could bring back into the main structure of the wiki. See the following sections for more details on how this wiki is structured, so you could get an idea of how you could help.

Please use the "Discussion" page for this article to voice your thoughts on its content.

Wiki Structure

 * It is advisable to keep the wiki structure as simple as possible to make sure that the readers can find the relevant information in as few steps as possible.
 * When creating several paths to a particular document use Redirects. For an examples see the Debian and Ubuntu pages.
 * Use the categories to organize the Scribus wiki.
 * Landing pages such as Development are used as hubs for the information in particular sections.
 * Use tags from to facilitate the application of editorial efforts to the pages that need it most.

Categories
Categories are like duct tape or the Jedi Force - they bind the universe, I mean the wiki, together. You can go to any article or category page, click on the Edit link at the top and type to add that article or sub-category to the parental category. Remember that is an especially powerful Jedi Mind Trick. It brings a page or a category into the topmost category Categories making it appear in the left side navigation sidebar. With great power comes accountability, so don't put things into Categories that don't belong at the top and are better located somewhere else in the category tree.

Templates
All templates that are used in this wiki are located in the Template Category. Please check this list before creating new templates. Use the templates to make the editing process more collaborative and efficient. For instance, Editorial Templates can be used at the top of pages to tag the pages for clarification, updates, or deletion.

Style guidelines
It is recommended to keep a neutral and uniform style of discourse. It is preferable not to switch between the first, second, and third person many times within the same article. Avoidance of colloquial words and phrases will help readers whose first language is not English. The sentences should be as short as possible.

Important precautions

 * Say no to orphaned pages: make yourself acquainted with the categorical structure of the wiki. Pages that are not categorized or not linked to other pages of the wiki are prime candidates for neglect. Make an effort to determine where the article you are writing or editing fits in the overall structure of the wiki and add the appropriate category or page links. is the preferred way to place a page into a category. See the category tree on the left side for the full list of available categories.


 * Be nice to thy neighbour: don't start shouting matches or editing wars -- that's what we have IRC for. If there is no consensus on how a particular documentation task could be completed then feel free to pursue an alternate route. The wiki has a lot of capacity and the categories can accommodate a lot of pages.


 * Preview before you save: a lot of people could be watching a page, so if you save an article without previewing and then have to redo your edits there could be many useless messages generated by the system that could have been avoided by a judicious use of the "Show preview" button.

Protected pages
Only those wiki users who are members of the administrators group can edit or otherwise manipulate the protected pages. If you are not in that group then please use the "Discussion" page (a.k.a Talk page) for that article to leave your comments and suggest improvements. We will grant administrative rights to regular contributors who have shown their skill and commitment to helping the community by improving the documentation in the wiki. If a problem is urgent please contact the Scribus Team members on irc or email the page author directly.

Official pages
The pages in the /Official: namespace are supposed to be the most polished quintessential guides for Scribus users amenable for inclusion into the official printed documents. If they aren't - the feedback is very welcome. Please use the "Discussion" tab for the page for your comments. Official articles are licensed under the Open Publication License ver. 1.0, which is not compatible with the SA-BA license that covers the rest of the wiki. As the result, materials cannot simply be moved from the rest of the wiki to the official section.