Contributing to SWiK is really easy. Just add some information about open source software or general software development to any page.

How to Edit

Just click edit this page (in the upper right-hand corner) on any page and start typing! Anyone can do it, no registration required. Neat, eh?

To format your pages you can use Textile markup. Textile hints are at the right of every edit page that are a subset of the advanced formatting options available with Textile.

Note, you can make edits to the project sandbox if you want to try out the wiki system itself…

Textile:

you type	it becomes
*strong*	strong
_emphasis_	emphasis

Play with Textile, or read the full Textile reference.

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How You Can Help

SWiK is a community run wiki. This means that users have all the control, but also that the wiki requires the help of people like you to continue.

You can help out by adding a project:

1. Search for a project
2. If the project is not in SWiK yet, you can click on ‘add project to SWiK’ to add it. SWiK helps you start building a project’s information automatically from web services, or you can start editing any time.
3. Click save, that’s it, congrats you’ve started a new project page in SWiK.

Or find an existing project you know about, and start adding what you know about the project to the page. This could be stuff like:

1. “How to get started with this project”
2. “More history of this project”, where did it start, why did it get going?
3. “Common issues you might have with this project, how to fix them”

It’s a wiki, so you can add whatever you want, the basic guideline is that it should make using and finding out about open source software easier.

You can even help set guidelines for SWiK by expanding to this page or making a new page under /SWiK about how you can use SWiK to help people learn about open source and use it more easily.

Another way to help is check out or subscribe to the recent edits for pages. By paying some attention to the history, spam or vandalism can be stopped quickly.

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Creating More Pages

1. Click on the ‘Add a new page’ button in the top left of an existing project or wiki page.
2. Choose a title, and if you want, fill in the text body of the page.

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Tagging

Tags are how SWiK relates and organizes content. You can make up any tag you like, there are no rules! (no spaces).

To help organize SWiK: edit pages and fill in some tags that will help tie those pages to other similar pages.

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RSS or Atom Feeds

You can subscribe any RSS or Atom feed to SWiK pages:

1. Click ‘add a new page‘
2. Click ‘syndicate rss‘
3. Enter the URL of the RSS or Atom feed you want to syndicate
4. Click Add Page
5. That’s it—the SWiK syndication bot will begin syndicating content from the feed.

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Changelog

Of course as with any social-software, SWiK is vulnerable to spam and other vandalism: spammers or vandals occasionally edit too.

To combat spam, SWiK maintains a global changelog along with a changelog for every page, or every user or ip’s changes.

These changelogs can be syndicated using your favorite RSS reader.

It’s easy to undo spam: click on the undo button on the offending change.

SWiK also includes some hidden features that helps prevent some types of spam from being a problem, however the goal is that any spam prevention mechanisms will be invisible to those trying to help build a useful resource for open source software information.

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More Help

• You can change the logos of a page by going to “other page actions” and selecting “change page icon” – this will allow you to either upload an icon or copy one from a url.