Contributing to the AskMonty Knowledgebase

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This article is about contributing articles and questions to the Knowledgebase. See the Translation HOWTO for information on translating Knowledgebase articles. See Contributing to the MariaDB Project for information on contributing to MariaDB itself.

Knowledgebase Accounts

As a deterrent against anonymous trolling, an account is required to be able to post questions, edit pages, and contribute new articles. You can either create one here at the AskMonty Knowledgebase, or login using any OpenID provider you have an account with (e.g. launchpad.net, myOpenID, and others...).

Keeping in Touch

Keep in touch with other Knowledgebase contributors on the maria-docs mailing list, or on the IRC channel #maria on Freenode.

Asking Questions

Asking a question is probably the easiest way to contribute to the AskMonty Knowledgebase. Once logged in, go to any category and look to your right to see the big Ask a question here option. Ask a question and you will get an answer usually within 48-hours. Vague questions and questions-that-aren't-really-questions are harder to answer, so try to be clear.

Commenting on Articles

You can also add comments to articles. As with asking questions, you will have to be logged in with an account to do so.

The knowledgebase is not an appropriate place to ask about purchasing support for MariaDB. Instead, please use the Monty Program Ab contact page.

Contributing Original Articles

Creating an article for the Knowledgebase is similar to asking questions. First, navigate to the category where you feel the article should be. Once there, double check that an article doesn't already exist which would work. It is usually better to improve an existing article (if possible) than to create a new one.

If you determine that a new article is needed, click on the "Create Article" button. If you are logged in and you don't see that button, you are probably viewing an article, not a category. In which case, you need to use the breadcrumbs near the top of the page to navigate up to the parent category.

If you decide to just edit an existing article, click on the "Edit" button.

When you are finished editing an article, please add a revision comment, this will help our editors as they review edits.

Also, when editing an article or creating a new one you can select whether to subscribe to it. When you are subscribed to an article you will receive an email every time the page is updated. To unsubscribe from a page, click on the Edit button, uncheck the subscribe box and click Save.

Formatting Content

Articles, questions, and comments are formatted in the Creole markup language. The Editing Help page has information on the various supported tags and macros. If you are familiar with mediawiki or other wikis, you should have no trouble getting up to speed with Creole.

Translating Knowledgebase Articles

See the Translation HOWTO for information on translating Knowledgebase articles.

How to View Your (and others') Edit History

You can view your recent edit history by clicking on your username (it's displayed at the top right of every page, next to the search box).

The link will be of the form http://kb.askmonty.org/user/id/your-username and if you know the username of another user you can put their username in the address bar to view their edit history.

Contribution statistics for all users are located here: http://kb.askmonty.org/stats/users/

Some style notes

English (US) is the preferred variant of the English to use when creating original articles for the Knowledgebase.

This does not mean that we believe the content should only be available in English. We would like the content to be available in as many languages as possible. However, so that we can verify the accuracy of a new article, it first needs to be written in English.

Tasks

We are working on having an issue tracker to track things that need improvements in the Knowledgebase. Until then, we have a partial list below. This list is not exhaustive. If you find something to work on

  • CREATE EVENT
    • Write a detailed explanation of the SCHEDULE clause, with example.
    • Document the ON COMPLETION clause.
    • Document ENABLE, DISABLE, and DISABLE ON SLAVE.
    • Document COMMENT.
    • Document the time units.

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