MediaWiki

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~Do: break the help content off into its own page


MediaWiki Home Page: http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/



  • When editing a page, you can use HTML. There is also a handy toolbar to help you out.. however, don't get used to a lot of that crappy wiki markup. Using apostrophies to italicize and bold is a horror I won't tolerate.
  • Don't cling to anything you write.. it's for the benefit of us all. Similarly, be brave and edit someone else's work whenever you'd like. If it's a touchy thing to do, then add a note in its discussion page and also add a note to the editor's talk page. You'll get the hang of things.
  • hotkeys -- mouseover a link to learn them all:
    • alt-e edit a page
    • alt-r recent changes
    • alt-s save a page being edited
  • Links are coloured: red is not existant, blue exists, and external links have a little graphic beside them.
  • Surround links to a page with [[ and ]] and a page which does not exist yet will be displayed as red -- follow that link to make the page. Don't pull any funny stuff and make pages that aren't linked to by a parent page.
  • A complete history is kept on every page. This makes it easy to refer to earlier revisions or to roll back to an earlier time to easily clean graffiti.
  • Pages can be locked my administrators so that they can only be edited by an admin.
  • Only users who have created a login can edit pages. This helps reduce the impact of graffiti and spamming, and gives additional benefits with communicating directly to an editor.
  • Everyone has their own personal page.
  • One is notified when one's personal talk page has been edited. It is a good practice to write a note in someone's talk page to remind them about a topic elsewhere.
  • Use three tilde's ~ to sign your name, and four to include a timestamp. You can adjust your preferences to have your signature be more fancy.
  • Play around in the sandbox. This helps keep page history clean.
  • Each page has a discussion tab. Even if you can't edit a page you can discuss it. Discussion in a separate page keeps main pages clean.
  • Several useful Templates exist:
    • Footnotes with {{fn|1}} {{fnb|comment}}
    • Badges with {{Do|Comment}} and {{Fixme|Comment}}
  • Tack on various things to the end of a title: [[Main Page]]s becomes Main Pages
  • Display a link differently: [[Main Page|display name]] becomes display name
  • Try to keep page titles lowercase. Main Page != Main page. It can be very confusing for editors to remember what case everything is in. Don't succumb to the need to capitalize because it's the title of a document!
  • Edit a page to add #REDIRECT [[Go here instead]] to redirect people to another page. This lets you make plural pages and alternate grammer pages / etc.

Random notes

During Executive meetings:2005-05, the idea of a second wiki was brought up. MediaWiki 1.5 will have users/groups but that's not secure enough for our concerns, so a second wiki installation in a secure subdirectory will end up being made.



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