Types of contributions¶
There are many different ways to contribute, no matter your level of prior knowledge. Our issue labels include the following options that you can use to filter the issues list according to the type of contribution you want to make.
Technical¶
These types of tasks might require you to have a good amount of prior experience with servers, networking, hardware, or related topics. This might include:
Technical reviews
Technical updates
It could also include creating content, if you want to submit a guide on how to accomplish a specific task, or an explanation of a topic.
Coding options¶
Some issues require specific knowledge or technical expertise, such as:
Creating vale rules
Improving GitHub actions and workflows
Creating graphics from code using Mermaid
Fixing incorrect code snippets in the documentation
Low-code options¶
If you are happy to work with Markdown (or MyST) formatting, you can edit our documentation directly to fix:
Spelling and grammatical errors.
Updating broken links.
Unclear explanations or imprecise language.
Testing tutorials and how-to guide steps.
Fixing or creating graphics from code using Mermaid. If you are not familiar with the syntax, they have a live online generator tool that will create the code for a diagram you design.
No-code options¶
If you spot something in the documentation that could be improved (or needs to be corrected), the best way to contribute is to report it!
Creating issues¶
Since we use GitHub issues to track problems with the documentation, creating issues is a great way to contribute. You can use the “Give feedback” button at the top of any page in the documentation to report the issue you have found.
Take care to describe any issue in detail so that the reviewer can understand the problem clearly. A detailed issue might include a link to the affected part of the documentation, a description of the problem and – optionally – a suggested solution.
This can also be a method for suggesting improvements or giving any other feedback you might want to share!
User-experience testing¶
We want the Ubuntu Server documentation to be as accessible as possible. If you have feedback about any aspect of your experience of using our documentation, this is incredibly valuable to us! If you have identified any areas we can improve upon please let us know by opening an issue.
Please check the issues list first to see if someone has already reported the same (or a similar) issue – if they have, then leave your thoughts as a reply on that issue. By keeping discussions together in one place, it makes it easier for us to understand the impact and gather opinions from affected readers.
Copy editing¶
You can edit individual documentation pages directly in the GitHub web interface if you don’t want to work on the command line. To do this, select the pencil icon next to the “Give feedback” button. For details about how to use the web editor, you can refer to their documentation which has several handy guides.