Contributing to the Unofficial Fedora FAQ

I really like contributions to the FAQ! If you want to contribute, there's two ways. The first is the easy way: just send me some text! The second is even better: write the HTML yourself, and send it to me! (See lower on this page for some guidelines for HTML.) You can email me any contributions that you have.

Guidelines

Below are some guidelines that I use personally when writing the FAQ. Don't worry if you have a submission that doesn't fit all of them perfectly -- I can help you out with it if you email me! When in doubt, you can read the FAQ and see how current questions are written.

Purpose of the FAQ: To help all computer users use Fedora, by giving them the solutions for the most common problems in Fedora.

• Target Audience: When I'm writing the FAQ, I think of a reader who has never used Linux before, but wants to try out Fedora. That way, new users can understand the FAQ, but advanced users can still use it as a useful resource.
• The questions should be frequently asked. For less-frequently-asked questions, FedoraForum is a great resource. For example, "I can't install Fedora on my brand new Dell computer, what do I have to do?" would definitely be frequently asked. "How do I write a C++ program in Fedora to toast my socks?" would definitely not be frequently asked.

  It's usually pretty easy to look around FedoraForum and see if people are asking the same question over and over. :-) When in doubt, you can send me the question and I'll let you know if it's frequently asked!

• Simplicity: I aim to make the FAQ answers as simple as possible. That means that if there's more than one answer to a question, I will pick whichever one will be the easiest for a new user. Sometimes it won't be the "best" answer, but it will always work and be easy. For example, this is why I use yum in the FAQ instead of apt -- yum comes with Fedora, and apt is an additional download, which is more complexity.

  This also means that I don't use words that new users won't know. If I do have to use a word like that, I always explain it before I use it.

• Brevity (Shortness): The FAQ should be very brief. I like the idea that a new user can easily read over the entire FAQ in a single sitting. I tend to remove sentences that aren't necessary.
• Fedora-specific: Usually, FAQ questions are about about things that specifically affect Fedora users. There are a lot of resources on the Internet for general Linux help, but not as many for Fedora in particular. So, the FAQ tries to be a Fedora resource. If you want to contribute a general question about Linux basics that would be helpful for Fedora users, you can contribute it to the Fedora Basics FAQ (coming soon)!
• Clarity: For many readers of the Fedora FAQ, English is not a native language. So, I try to keep FAQ questions and answers as clear as I possibly can, and I try to avoid complex words.
• Character: It's OK to have a little fun, sometimes. Sometimes I will leave in sentences that don't need to be there, because I think they add a little character to the FAQ, and make it more enjoyable to read.

HTML Guidelines

If you want to contribute directly with HTML, that makes me really happy! Below are some guidelines that I use in the FAQ's HTML. Don't worry if you can't get all of them in your HTML -- email me and I can help. :-)

• Simple XHTML Structure: All the questions have the same structure, if you want to submit your own HTML, just view the souce of the FAQ and "fill in the blanks." All of the HTML on the FAQ page validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
• Consistent Style: This is accomplished by the XHTML (the above point) and through my CSS. Don't worry if you don't know a lot about CSS -- just find a part of the FAQ that looks like what you want and use the source code from there.
• Never break links: There are hundreds (if not thousands) of links to this FAQ around the Internet, none of them should ever return a "404 Not Found" unless they have a typo. Also, the anchors (the part after the "#" mark) should always work. This means that if you change the name of an anchor, keep another copy around with the old name, at the same place.

  See Cool URIs don't change (written by the man who invented HTML and the WWW) if you want to know why I do this.