Difference between revisions of "Beginner's Guide to the Wiki"

Revision as of 10:57, 8 April 2010

The Beginner's Guide to the Wiki will be a comprehensive resource to assist new members. It will be completed by the end of 2009-10.

Creating a page

To create a page, you need to click on a Red Link. You might find red links around the wiki, or if you want to create one yourself, you can search for a pagename that doesn't exist in the search bar on the left hand side of the screen. If the page truly does not exist, you'll see a message

There is no page titled "red link". You can create this page. 

Where "this page" will be the red link to the page you want to create.

Editing a page

If you go to a page that doesn't exist by following a red link, you'll be prompted to edit it immediately, but if you're editing an already existent page, you'll need to click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page. Some pages are protected and can only be edited by System Operators (SysOps) such as the members of the Wiki Task Force . The Main Page is an example of a protected page.

Questions and Comments

If you're not sure whether or not to edit something, or you want to comment on the way information is being presented without changing it yourself, make a note of it in the Discussion or Talk page of the article you're considering. To do this, click the "discussion tab" at the top of any page.

Discussion Best Practices

If you're opening a new category of discussion, create a new header by using two equals signs around some header text, as in "==Header 1==."

If you're responding to someone else's comment, prefix your comment with a colon (":"). This will cause it to be indented by one indentation. This means that if your comment is the third one in a conversation (the second reply), you need two colons, as in "::Reply lorem ipsum, etc."

Always sign your comments with a series of four tildes ~~~~. This will cause your username, and the time of your edit to be appended to your comment. For example, were I to sign this with four tildes, you would see "Stefanido 10:40, 11 March 2010 (EST)"

Text and Links

Text

To add text to a page, just enter it as you normally would into a word processor. However, you should put a blank line between paragraphs.

Bulleted Lists

To make a bulleted list use asterisks (*), as in

loremipsum dolorsitamet
*Item 1
*Item 2
*Item 3

Links

To make a link to another page on the wiki, enclose the text in double square brackets eg.[[link]]. This will link to the page name enclosed, so if you wrote [[Main Page]], you would link to the Main Page. However, if you want to link to a page without using its name in the link text, you need to write the page name then a vertical bar and the the text to be displayed as in eg. [[Page to Link|you will see this]]. For example, if we wanted to link to an article about EVA Suits with the text "Space Activity Suit," we would write [[EVA Suits|space activity suit]], and you would see space activity suit.

In order to link to a page outside of the wiki, for example one on Wikipedia, you would use single brackets, as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCESS]. If you want it to show up as something else, simply add a space after the URL and then type out whatever you want to text to appear as, as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCESS The OCESS Wikipedia Page]. If you try this you will see The OCESS Wikipedia Page.

Redirects

Let Foo be the redirecting article and Bar be the article it redirects to.

1. Edit Foo such that the page's sole content is "#REDIRECT [[Bar]]"
2. Save the page.

All links to Foo will now send the user to Bar instead. Please note that the space is necessary, as otherwise the page will be set up to redirect to multiple pages and as such will just be an empty page with a large arrow pointing to your link.

See Also

• Wikimedia's Help Pages