Help:Contributing

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1 I'd like to contribute to LyricWiki. What should I do?

I'd like to contribute to LyricWiki. What should I do?

There are many ways! Below are just some of our best ideas, which include many things you can do with minimal effort.

First off... if you're experienced with wikis and not in the mood to work on songs, we could use some help finishing all of the pages that link off of this one but don't exist yet!

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Create new pages

Creating a new page is often a very useful thing to do, especially if there are lots of other pages linking to an empty page. A page can be for an artist, an album, or a song. Artist and album pages contain links to the song pages, and the song pages contain the lyrics (the good stuff). There is a list of wanted pages that is automatically updated.

LyricWiki articles contain lots of links to other articles. Blue (or purple, if you have already visited them) links represent pages that do exist. Red links point to pages that don't yet exist. Presumably, whoever created the link thought that an article on the topic should exist. It's possible this was a bad idea, and the link should be removed. It's also possible they made a spelling error or didn't know the correct name for a page on the same (or a more general topic) that does exist. In this case, you could fix the link, and/or create a redirect. If you decide there should be an article at the other end of the link, by all means start writing it!

In addition to looking for red links, you can look at a list of requested articles, and pick one you know something about. (See the section "Where do I start?" below.)

Please do read Help:Your first article for additional advice about how and when not to create a new article.

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Make a donation

LyricWiki is in constant need of more server capacity, bandwidth, and other technical services, to keep it running and fast enough to be useful. Financial contributions to our parent, Motive Force LLC, are greatly appreciated. Please see Donations page.

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Publicize LyricWiki

See LyricWiki:Publicity for ideas.

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Special Requests

Some specific projects that could help the site out a lot:

WinAmp plugin to allow users to right-click & choose from a menu, or press a button, or type a shortcut to find lyrics for a certain song.
iTunes plugin to get the lyrics to a song.

If you finish any of these tasks, please contact Sean Colombo so that we can promote them (and you!) on the site.

correct UTF-8 encoding for international artists (spanish, deutsch and french accents...)

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Spruce up existing pages

The first 200,000+ songs on the site (and their album and artist pages) were added by ÜberBot who is just a bot, so the pages are very generic to start with. Here are some ideas of how to spruce up existing pages:

Correct poorly formatted or incorrect lyrics.
Add album-art to an album page.
Add links to the artist's official site.
Create Amazon links to the exact match (instead of the default link that just searches for the title). If you use our affiliate linking-format this also helps us earn some money to offset the costs of the site. See Template:asin for more info.
The Category “Review Me” lists pages that have been added by a program and might need a human checking.
The list of Orphaned Pages lists pages that are not linked anywhere. You could add those songs to the artists page and the album, if you know it.

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Maintenance tasks

There are many things that need doing that don't necessarily involve creatively editing article content. See LyricWiki:Cleaning department for a list of janitorial tasks that we always need help with, Category:LyricWiki maintenance or the section "Start with a list of things that need doing", below.

In addition, if a LyricWiki contributor sees a problem that they don't know how to fix or don't want to at the moment, they will mark it using {{edit|Reason edit is requested goes here}} which will then make it part of Category:Requests For Edits. Please click Category:Requests For Edits to see all of these requests and maybe resolve a few issues.

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Where do I start?

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Start with songs/bands you know

Check to make sure that your favorite artists' pages are top-notch and have all the appropriate links and content. Check out the lyrics to your favorite songs and make sure they are accurate and well formatted (consistent grammar and capitalization). Who is going to take care of the artists if not their fans!?

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