Gentoo Wiki:FAQ/en

How is this wiki related to other wikis about Gentoo Linux?
When this wiki was created there were already several other Gentoo-related wikis in existence, the most well known being gentoo-wiki.com. Nevertheless, this official Gentoo Linux wiki was created because most Gentoo developers and some other interested users would not contribute to community wikis; they wanted an official Gentoo Wiki.

An invitation was extended to the gentoo-wiki.com operators to merge with the Gentoo Wiki project. After some discussion they declined. Note: gentoo-wiki.com is now a dead link (Sept. 2021).

The Gentoo Wiki herd is aware of the fact that there will be duplicated effort, because the goals of the wikis overlap. However, this does not change the reasons to develop an official Wiki for Gentoo-related documentation.

Can I copy an article to here from another wiki?
Because of incompatible licenses, "copy-and-paste" of articles from gentoo-wiki.com to here is not allowed, unless all authors of an article explicitly re-license their contributions for use here.

If some other wiki uses the same licence as this Wiki (CC-BY-SA 3.0), it may be possible to copy or import the article to this wiki in a way that preserves a record of its edit history (necessary for proper licensing). Please post a request at Gentoo Wiki:Suggestions if you want to do this.

Can I contribute an article in a language other than English?
Not unless there is an English version first. This Wiki encourages the localization of pages into different languages through the use of the MediaWiki Translate extension. The extension offers several in-wiki features enabling translation of English originals to localized versions.


 * Since pages can be translated section by section instead of the whole page at once, several translators can share the work.
 * Each translated page shows how complete the translation is as a percent. Also, each untranslated section is displayed in the English original on the not-yet-complete translated page, so no information is lost.
 * Sections needing re-translation to sync them up with the English original are highlighted on the translation tool pages.
 * The language bar shown at the top of translatable articles lists only existing translated pages.

The Gentoo Wiki project is well aware that use of this extension places a slight burden on translators (to learn the new translation interface), and that the creation of original pages in languages other than English is not possible (since English is assumed to be the original language of each article). However, they feel that the increase in quality and timeliness of translations outweighs the disadvantages.

If you really want to contribute a non-English article that you cannot translate into English first, please request help at Gentoo Wiki:Suggestions.