HowTo Contribute
The D.U.C.K. (Documenting Useful Collected Knowledge) Wiki was created as a project to consolidate years of documentation on a wide array of subject matters into one organized and searchable location. It grew into a community of contributing authors. Some works are simply submitted by email and posted to the wiki by the administrator. However, user registration is encouraged so contribution can be direct, simple, and efficient.
To contribute you must 1. register using an active email address, 2. answer a security question, and 3. become approved by a site administrator. Once registered, you are officially an author and can contribute by creating new pages and editing existing ones. You can correct errors, contribute additional knowledge, and clarify poorly written documentation.
Our Goal is simple:
- Neutrality and Objectivity - try to document fact, not opinion.
- Comprehensibility and Clarity - be direct and clear on your subject matter.
- Uniformity and Cohesion - use existing DUCK wiki conventions including our categories.
This Wiki is an informative resource that allows an open exchange of information. For this to work, users must observe some rather axiomatic ground rules. This not only impacts contributions on discussion pages, but primarily also the style of writing in your own articles. The following should therefore be avoided: slander/libel, trolling, intentional errors, and political opinions. It is known that some of our technical articles have some degree of opinion, which will only be tolerated when it is useful and informative to readers.
A tolerated opinion in a factual contribution might be, for example, "it is our opinion that abc contains adware and spyware in addition to being poorly written software." This makes it informative and useful to those by helping folks avoid a bad software product. An example of an opinion that is not tolerated is, "race abc is inferior..." or anything hateful and racist, or against any persons beliefs is not tolerated and will surely result in you being banned. Stick with the facts, and keep the site pertaining to technical knowledge and not any social commentary.
The majority of articles in this wiki are technical documents. Good technical documentation ensures that the text can be easily understood. Convoluted sentences should be avoided. Each sentence should make a clear, specific statement. Complex facts should be properly clarified. Suitable means of providing clarification include, depending on circumstances, illustrative graphics or multimedia material.
Use one or more existing categories at the bottom of the article. Only create new categories when there are a series of articles that can belong. Study the existing categories and groups before adding new articles. When uploading images, keep them as small in file size as possible by optimizing them based on contents.
Share with us as much as possible of what you know. Unlike WikiPedia, we DO allow original works and information based on your own experimentation. You can source yourself, as long as you have done proper testing or have first hand experience of what you are saying is empirical fact.
The original author of the base documents in this wiki is a UNIX system administrator dating back to work from the 1980s. A lot has changed since then and nothing changes faster than technology.
Enjoy!
