Polkadot Wiki

The Polkadot Wiki is the central source of truth for Polkadot. It is a community-focused initiative led by the Web3 Foundation to keep an up-to-date resource on the best information for building on Polkadot, learning about Polkadot, or maintaining a node on Polkadot.

Contributing to Documentation

The Wiki is a community-focused initiative and we will review all pull-requests and issues created in this repository. If you notice typos or grammatical errors, please feel free to directly create pull requests with these corrections. Larger contributions may start as issues to test the waters on the subject with the maintainers. It is generally preferable to create a pull request over an issue to propose a change to the wiki content.

Running Locally

Both the Polkadot Wiki and the Kusama Guide are built from the source files in this repository. After cloning the source locally, you can start the websites with each of these respective commands (ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies):

# For the Polkadot Wiki:
yarn polkadot:start
# For the Kusama Guide:
yarn kusama:start

Style Guide

Use the style guide from the Substrate Knowledge Base

Formatting

Use Prettier to format markdown pages. To run Prettier on the docs folder, run:

npx prettier --write ./docs/

Automated Deployments

The wiki is automatically deployed to GitHub Pages via the CircleCI job on each new commit to the master branch. The Kusama guide is also deployed to GitHub Pages (via a separate repository). Both websites are also uploaded to IPFS via GitHub actions.

Dynamic Value Inserts

This documentation sometimes makes references to on-chain values that may change over time. For example, it might reference the current number of validators. A custom script exists to populate these values post-build. To avoid conflicts in source files, the replacement is done on built files, not the MD files. The value placeholders are defined in scripts/inject-dict.json. The placeholders should be included in text surrounded by double curly braces, like so: {{ num_validators }}.

To use the replace script:

# For Polkadot Wiki
yarn polkadot:inject
# For Kusama Guide
yarn kusama:inject

This will read the dictionary and do the replacements for the respective website.

It is recommended to use the dry run option when adding new values and templates in, to make sure they resolve to values first and don't throw query errors. To use dry run (no replace, just output of templates and their resolved potential replacements), use the --dry or -d flag:

yarn polkadot:inject --dry

The script defaults to the websocket URL wss://kusama-rpc.polkadot.io/. To change to another URL or to connect to a local node, use the --node/-n flag:

yarn polkadot:inject -n ws://localhost:9944

Note: make sure you're running an archive node if you're querying into the past!

See other available options by using the help command.

yarn polkadot:inject help

The templates to replace in the text take the following format:

  {
    "tpl": "tip_deposit_amount",
    "default": { "kusama": 0.166, "polkadot": 1 },
    "path": "consts.treasury.tipReportDepositBase",
    "filters": ["humanReadableToken"]
  },

• tpl is the template you want replaced in the text, it should be placed between {{ }} curly braces.
• default is either a literal value or an object with chain-specific defaults.
• path is the query to run on the chain
• computed is a value that should be set to true is the value does not need a path. Computed properties are exported from computed.js.
• filters is an array of filters to apply on the value after it's been fetched (does not apply to defaults). Filters are defined in applyFilters or inject.js.

To test the injection, run polkadot:build and kusama:build, then polkadot:inject and kusama:inject. Inspect the built files in the corresponding build folder under website or kusama-guide.

Conditional Rendering

The two wikis support conditional rendering depending on which wiki is being deployed. This is useful for mirrored pages that have most content in common, but some minor differences. To use this functionality, surround Kusama specific content with {{ kusama: :kusama }}, and polkadot specific content with {{ polkadot: :polkadot }}. Example:

If the treasury ends a budget period without spending all of its funds, it suffers a burn of a
percentage of its funds -- thereby causing deflationary pressure.
{{ polkadot: This percentage is currently at 1%
on Polkadot. :polkadot }} {{ kusama: This percentage is currently 0.2% on Kusama, with the amount currently going to
[Society](https://guide.kusama.network/docs/en/maintain-guides-society-kusama) rather than being
burned. :kusama }}

To test the resolution, run polkadot:build and kusama:build, then polkadot:inject and kusama:inject. Inspect the built files in the corresponding build folder under website or kusama-guide.

Mirror pages

A limitation of Docusaurus is that pages can only be included in one sidebar at any given time. Thus, our Kusama section will either hijack some content it shares with the rest of the wiki, or lack that content.

To solve this, the repo mirrors some pages and includes them in additional sidebars. The scripts folder contains a mirror.js script that creates a copy of the pages to duplicate across sidebars. The new pages are prefixed with mirror, and first need to be declared in mirror.js and added to the relevant sidebar section. To run the script:

yarn mirror

Note: This command runs automatically when using polkadot:start or kusama:start development scripts, so you don't need to worry about running it manually if you start the development site with one of these commands.

Internationalization

We are using Crowdin to manage all different translations. You can go to the project page and select the language you would like to translate to start.
All translated content through Crowdin will regularly submit a pull request to this repository.

If you do not see the language you would like to translate, please let us know via Riot.

License

The Polkadot Wiki is licensed under the GPL-3.0 free software license.