Contributing to the Wiki

The OpenWrt documentation lives in a DokuWiki at openwrt.org/docs. It is maintained by the community.

Getting an account

Self-registration is disabled to keep the wiki spam-free. Apply for editor access via the forum thread Applying for OpenWrt wiki account or ask on IRC.

What makes a good wiki article

These principles guide existing wiki content; new contributions should follow them:

• Keep it simple. Use the editor’s basic formatting, plus code blocks and tables where they help. Articles need to be easy to read and easy for the next person to edit.
• Don’t duplicate within the wiki. If a procedure already exists elsewhere, link to it instead of copying. One canonical version per topic.
• Don’t duplicate upstream. Generic Linux/networking content belongs upstream; the wiki should link to it.
• Target the current stable release. Mark deprecated or experimental material clearly.
• Be findable. Titles and intros should contain the keywords readers will actually search for. Short and descriptive beats long and clever.
• Open with the goal. The first paragraph should tell the reader what the article does for them and when to use it.
• Verify what you write. Speculation should be labelled as such. Cite sources for non-obvious claims.
• Test tutorials. If you can’t test a procedure yourself, say so in the article and ask someone to verify and remove the warning.
• One topic per article. If a procedure has many branches or is very long, split it.
• Make it discoverable. New articles should be linked from a category page or a closely related article.

Wiki structure

The wiki is organised into namespaces (top-level sections, max three sublevels deep):

• about — project information
• toh — Table of Hardware (supported devices)
• packages — package listings
• downloads — release information
• docs — main documentation tree
• wiki — wiki rules and meta
• faq
• inbox — work-in-progress drafts
• playground — for testing markup

Documentation under docs is split into three guides: Quick Start, User Guide, and Developer Guide. Tags allow articles to belong to multiple topics simultaneously.

License

Wiki content is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International unless noted otherwise. Submitting an edit means you agree to license your contribution under the same terms.