Help:Contributing

Creating a new page is 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).

LyricWiki pages contain lots of links to other pages and related articles. Blue links (or purple, if you have already visited them) represent pages that exist. Red links indicate pages that don't...yet. You may well be wondering why anyone would create a link to a page that doesn't exist. The usual explanation for this is that whoever created the link thought that the page should exist. However it is also possible that they made a spelling error, an error in capitalization, or simply didn't know the correct name for the page that they were trying to link to. If this is the case, you could fix the link by correcting any errors, or if you feel the error likely to be repeated, create the page from the link and then redirect the page you have just created to the correctly named page. If it is simply a case that the page does not exist and you also feel that there should be a page created, then there would be many who would be glad if you kicked the page into touch by adding the relevant information!

In addition to looking for red links, you can also look at the list of requested pages and pick one you know something about. This list is automatically updated.

Please read Help:Contents/Getting Started/Creating A New Page for additional advice about how and when not to create a new article. See also the section "Where do I start?" below.

Publicize LyricWikiEdit

See LyricWiki:Publicity for ideas.

Special RequestsEdit

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

correct UTF-8 encoding for international artists (spanish, deutsch and french accents...). These are scattered all over the site. If you find one, please add {{Accent}} to the page. The current pages with the {{Accent}} template on them are at Category:Requests For Edits/Accented Characters

Spruce up existing pagesEdit

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 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.

Maintenance tasksEdit

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

In addition, if a LyricWiki contributor sees a problem that either they don't know, or haven't got enough time to fix, they mark it using {{edit|Reason edit is requested goes here}}. This then places the page in Category:Requests For Edits, so please check this category too, to see if maybe you can resolve some of these issues.

Where do I start?Edit

Start with songs/bands you knowEdit

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!?