Contributing
From GMod Wiki
 | Do you want to give back to the Garry's Mod community? Contributing to the wiki is a great way to do so. It is very easy, gives you a great sense of accomplishment, and helps out others who may have struggled with a problem before. Best of all, it's super easy to do! Just jump in and start helping! |
Create an account
In order to edit anything, you need an account. You can easily make one by clicking on the link the top right of this page and following the instructions.
How to edit a page
Editing a wiki page is very easy. An awesome tool for learning how to edit wikis comes from the greatest and most well known wiki of all, Wikipedia. Wikipedia's How to edit Wikipedia -guide shows you how to edit and what special things you can do to pages using WikiText (or WikiMarkup). For help on items specific to Garry's Mod Wiki, see Help:Editing and The Garry's Mod Wiki Tutorial.
Know the rules and guidelines
When using and editing the Garry's Mod wiki, you should always follow the rules and guidelines. This Wiki uses pretty much the same rules as Wikipedia, stated on their Policies and Guidelines -page. However, as there are administators of this wiki, breaches of the rules will be acted upon much more harshly than they would at Wikipedia.
Know what to edit
If you're going to spend some time contributing to and editing the Garry's Mod wiki, you should know what to edit and what will help the most. This is the easy part. You can browse the wiki, find a red link, click it, and fill in some content!
Of course, you should have some idea of what you are filling in. If you are good at Derma, and know how to use any of the undocumented Derma functions, take a look around Derma Controls and fill some in!
As of the writing of this article, there are 2077 pages that are linked to, but don't exist. These are listed at the wanted pages -page. If you want, you can browse through this and fill some in. Although, that may get a bit boring. However, if we have a task force of, say, 20 people, each contributing one page a day, it would only take 77 days to fill in every single wanted page!
Unfortunately, though, those are not the only pages that require editing. There are also:
400 pages that need an example...
72 pages that need some work...
18 pages that need reviewing...
81 pages that are stubs...
26 function pages with formatting errors...
3 pages that contain lists which are incomplete...
which make a total of 600 pages that need to be edited. These are pages that are partially filled in, but don't have enough information to match the standards aimed for by this wiki.
Keeping it organized
Even if your wiki article has a novel of information, it is useless if users can't find what they need. There are a number of handy templates, such as Template:Lua function and Template:Lua example which make it easy to enter the data and have it show in a nice neat format.
Entity.SetPos is a prime example of how to document an Lua function in this Wiki. As for Derma Controls, DFrame is a great example. It shows an image too, which helps the user understand exactly what the code produces. Once you get the hang of it, adding information to the wiki is a breeze!
Sit back and enjoy
So, what will you get out of this?
Kudos! Bragging rights! A warm fuzzy feeling! Whenever someone says that you do nothing to help anyone in the GMod Community, you can link them to your contributions page and reply "Well, what have you done?".
Of course, though, you'll get a large amount of thank you's. There are at least 10 people who constantly watch recent changes page (especially Unrealomega), and when they see someone doing a great deal amount of work, they'll be sure to go out of their way to give you a personal thank you. And, hey, you may even do enough to convince us to implement our own Barnstar-system!
 | Looking forward to seeing you in the recent changes page! |
