Gentoo Wiki:FAQ
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This FAQ is a collection of common questions about the Gentoo wiki, the documentation contained within, and editing the wiki, along with their corresponding answers.
For frequently asked questions relating to Gentoo in general, rather than the documentation and wiki, see the FAQ. See also the Portage FAQ for frequently asked questions about the package manager. There is also a FAQ secion in the handbook. See also the about Gentoo wiki page, and the wiki project page.
Who can edit the wiki and how
Anyone can edit the wiki! Anyone who can see a way to make the wiki better can log-in and make a change, just check out the contributor's guide first on how to get started.
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 someone really wants to contribute a non-English article that cannot first be translated into English, please request help at Gentoo Wiki:Feedback.
"This action has been automatically identified as harmful" error
When trying to save changes to an article, the following error may appear, and will prevent any changes from being committed :
This error is the abuse filter triggering when trying to link to an internal wiki page in the style "https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/<pagename>" (to be precise, anything containing "//wiki.gentoo.org/", with one exception). This is to avoid anyone using absolute links to reference wiki articles, as this does not allow the wiki to track links properly.
Can I copy an article to here from another wiki?
When this wiki was created there were several other Gentoo-related wikis in existence, the most well known being gentoo-wiki.com (an invitation was extended to the gentoo-wiki.com operators to merge with the Gentoo Wiki project, though after some discussion they declined).
Because of incompatible licenses, "copy-and-paste" of articles from archives of gentoo-wiki.com to here is not allowed, unless all authors of an article explicitly re-license their contributions for use here.
If an author has contributed an entire article to another wiki, that same author can recreate their original content here (preferably along with a quick note on the article's associated "Discussion" page explaining the article was moved from there to here). This is sufficient to constitute "re-licensing" of the content.
If some other wiki or website uses the same license as this wiki (CC-BY-SA 4.0), 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:Feedback to request this.