[[!meta title="Improve Tails documentation"]]

<div id="intro">

<p>Tails documentation would greatly benefit from your help.</p>

[[!toc levels=1]]

</div>

Good documentation is difficult to keep up-to-date. If you find a typo
or an error in the documentation please let us know — ideally, by
submitting a patch with your correction.

# Writing

The documentation on the website is not freely editable. The way we
document things has serious security implications. People should be able
to trust the Tails website as much as they trust Tails itself.
Furthermore, every change in the documentation possibly breaks the
translations that were made of the previous version.

But there are still many ways you can start contributing:

  - We maintain a list of [documentation
    tasks](https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues?query_id=172).
    You can start writing a draft in the corresponding ticket and then
    [[ask us for review|contribute/merge_policy]].

  - Small fixes and enhancements to the current documentation are
    greatly welcome. This can be done by sending Git patches to
    [[tails-dev@boum.org|about/contact#tails-dev]] or by publishing a
    [[Git]] branch (for example to a fork on
    [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/Tails/tails)). In general,
    documentation changes should be based on the `master` branch.

Documentation writers coordinate themselves on [[tails-dev@boum.org
mailing list|about/contact#tails-dev]], our development mailing list.

Documentation writers should also read our [[documentation
guidelines|guidelines]].

New documentation should be wrapped to 80 characters; however, please
do not submit patches that merely re-wrap existing text, as this makes
it harder to read the git history.

We recommend you to [[build an offline version of the
documentation|contribute/build/website]] to test your contributions
before sharing them with us.

# Tools

  - Images on our website are compressed and cleaned using the
    [[compress-image.sh]] script. To run this script you need the
    `optipng`, `advancecomp`, and `mat` packages.

  - To encode and decode QR codes, you can use the [[qrcode-encode.sh]]
    and [[qrcode-decode.sh]] scripts. To run these scripts
    you need to install the `qrencode` and `zbar-tools` packages.

    For example (run from Tails' source root):

        wiki/src/contribute/how/documentation/qrcode-encode.sh https://tails.boum.org/

    Creates a QR code in tails_boum_org.png. And:

        wiki/src/contribute/how/documentation/qrcode-decode.sh tails_boum_org.png

    Outputs:

        QR-Code:https://tails.boum.org/

# Translating

We want Tails [[end-user documentation|doc]] to be translated in
as many languages as possible. See the [[guidelines for
translators|contribute/how/translate]] for details.

# Related pages

  - [[Documentation guidelines|guidelines]]
  - [[Checklist for release notes|release_notes]]

# Talk to us

You can subscribe to [[tails-dev@boum.org|about/contact#tails-dev]],
our development mailing list.
