Thanks for helping with our Knowledge Base. For millions of people around the world, these articles are the face of Mozilla when they have a problem or question about one of our products. Improving the Knowledge Base is the way to get the biggest bang for our collective effort. A single article can quickly help tens of thousands of people each week.
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Create an account and say hello
As a nonprofit, open-source project, we rely on our community of volunteers to write and maintain the majority of the articles. You don't need special permission to work on them — this is a wiki that anyone can edit. All you need is your Mozilla account. (If you are already signed in to Mozilla Support, that link will redirect you to the Mozilla Support home page.)
Once you have an account and are signed in, you can introduce yourself and bring up topics in the Knowledge Base discussion forum or in one of the other Mozilla Support contributor forums.
You can also talk to us in the SUMO chat room on Matrix.
Get started writing
Are there Help topics for Mozilla products we haven't covered? You can do a search to find Knowledge Base articles that already exist.
Here's the essential information that will help you edit articles or create your first article:
- Anatomy of a Knowledge Base article – explains the basics of how articles are built.
- Create a new Knowledge Base article – steps for creating a new article along with some sample wiki markup to get you started.
- Edit a Knowledge Base article - steps for editing an existing article.
- Markup cheat sheet – the most commonly used wiki markup in our articles.
Help us improve existing articles
The most common thing we do in the glamorous world of Knowledge Base maintenance is to try to improve the articles we already have. If you see an article that can be improved, go to article's Editing Tools section (sign in to Mozilla Support if you don't see it), click Discussion and post a thread to let us know what should be fixed. You can also edit the article yourself and your proposed changes will be reviewed.
- Need Changes list: This list can be sorted by product. Clicking on a link will open the article's History page. From there, click Article under Editing Tools to view the article, click Edit Article to update the article or click Discussion to discuss needed changes.
- Knowledge Base Overview: This list can be sorted by product and category. It includes a "Status" column for pending reviews and a "Needs Update" column for needed changes.
Complete list of article writing documentation
Click here for a list of articles for contributors to the Mozilla Support Knowledge Base.
If you're really interested in editing and writing documentation, here are a few resources that should help explain how we do things:
- About the Knowledge Base — is an overview of the mechanics of our Knowledge Base (for example, prioritization and scheduling).
- Writing guide for Knowledge Base articles — is a guide to writing techniques and styles that we use to make articles more engaging and effective. For the mechanics of actually creating or editing articles, see:
- When and how to use keywords to improve an article's search ranking — explains when adding keywords to an article is appropriate.
- How to make screenshots — is a step-by-step guide to creating screenshots to use in articles.
- Add images and screenshots to Knowledge Base articles — explains how to add screenshots and other images to KB articles and how to get them to display correctly.
- Markup chart — is our wiki markup reference. It gives examples and shows the markup that produces them.
- How to use {for} — this is the special wiki markup that lets us show instructions for different application versions (for example, Firefox 40) and operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS.
- Using Templates — templates are reusable pieces of content. You can include a complicated set of step-by-step instructions in multiple articles by using a template.
