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Contents 1 I'd like to contribute to LyricWiki. What should I do? 2 Create new pages 3 Make a donation 4 Publicize LyricWiki 5 Special Requests 6 Spruce up existing pages 7 Maintenance tasks 8 Where do I start? 8.1 Start with songs/bands you know 8.2 Start on a random page 8.3 Fill in a missing song 9 Thank you!

[edit] 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!

[edit] Create new pages

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Publicize LyricWiki

See LyricWiki:Publicity for ideas.

[edit] 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 or any other projects using the API, please feel free to add them to LyricWiki:Plugins to get them some more exposure.

• 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

[edit] 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.

[edit] Maintenance tasks

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.

[edit] Where do I start?

[edit] 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!?

[edit] Start on a random page

Visit a Special:Randompage and jump into the rabbit hole!

[edit] Fill in a missing song

We have several ways to find what songs aren't on this wiki which probably should be. We've aggregated a bunch of them on LyricWiki:Missing Songs

[edit] Thank you!

Your contributions are what make LyricWiki possible.