Difference between revisions of "Getting started on HCE wiki"

Latest revision as of 08:21, 17 December 2015

Welcome to HCE Wiki and thank you for deciding to help! If you are new to wikipedia editing, or just new to HCE Wiki, this is a right place to begin. The following page will teach you basics of how to write a wiki article and offer links to places on the Internet should you wish to expand your knowledge further. If you have an idea on how to expand this guide or if you feel something is explained poorly, please head to this page's talk page and post a comment.

Creating or editing an article

Luckily, creating an article in wiki, or any MediaWiki based wiki for that matter, is easy. For writing, you do not need to have any HTML and CSS knowledge as the wiki takes care of most of the layout and text-style formatting itself.

Creating an article

See also the Entry template for information about the general layout of a new article on the HCE wiki.

The fastest way to create an article on the wiki is to search for the entry you wish to create using the search bar in the top right. The wiki will, after telling you it can't find such an article, offer you to start one. Other way of creating an article is to click on a red link which you may find in some articles. The red colour indicates that there is no such article even though the page tries to link to it. By clicking on the link, you essentially do the same as searching for it, except you did not have to type the name of the article first as someone already expected such article to be made. You will be presented with an edit window.

Editing an article

To edit an already existing article, simply click the Edit button in the top right corner of the page, just left of the search bar.

The edit window

Provided you have the sufficient rights as a user to edit the article, you will be presented by the Edit window. It should look like this:

If you are accustomed to using text processors like Microsoft Word, then this view should be pretty familiar. Let's go over the different elements of it.

Wikitext, Preview and Changes tabs

On the top you can see three tabs. The first one is the editing view you are already in. This view is for the raw text that will be displayed on the page after you save it. The next tab is to preview the changes you just made without actually saving them. The third tab shows you how the version of the article you are writing differs from the one that was saved before. Of course, in case of a new article, it won't show you much.

Moving down to the second row, this is the part that you will use the most. Here you can change the formatting of selected text much like you would inside a desktop text processor. Apart from the Bold and Italics buttons, the second row also contains a number of other buttons that are explained below.

User signature

A - Adds your signature. This is useful for commenting in the Talk pages, since you don't need to write your nickname and make a link to your profile every time you are making a comment. During the editing, you will see the signature as a number of hyphens and tildes. But don't worry, these will get replaced by your signature and a link to your profile after saving the page.

Insert a link

B - Inserts a link, either a local wiki link to an article here, or an external link that leads to somewhere on the Internet.

The Insert link form has two fields. The Target page or URL: and the Text to display:. This allows you to customize how the link will appear in an article. If you only fill in the first field, the link will appear as the full URL, e.g. http://hcenat.zcu.cz/wiki/index.php. If you fill in the second field too, the long URL will get replaced by the text you've put in, but the link will functionally stay the same, e.g. HCE Wiki.

You may have also noticed the little blue arrows on the right side of the links. These indicates that they are external links and lead outside of the wiki. A local link, that goes to an article that is on this very wiki, does not have the little arrow. Example: Smartglasses. The wiki will take care of forming a proper HTML link for the article, so you don't have to worry about creating a HTML link manually.

Embed a file

C - Inserts a file, usually a picture, to the body of the article.

The Filename: field is mandatory. You will need to upload the file to the wiki first, using the Special:Upload page. After successfully uploading the file, you can copy the file name, including the File: part, into the Filename: field, click Insert, and the file will be embedded into the page at the place of the cursor. See How to upload a file guide for more information on uploading files to this wiki.

You can also type the caption for the file, as well as select it's position and dimensions on the page. For more information on how to work with inserting images and other files, refer to the MediWiki Images Help page.

Add a reference

D - Creates a reference at the position of the cursor.

This way you can create a reference for what you are currently writing about, be it a link to a news article or a book. You type the bibliographic reference into the form, click insert, and the reference will be created. It will not display the entire reference in the body of the article, though. A numbered link will be placed at the position where you create the reference. The full text will be automatically placed at the end of the article, together with other references in chronological order based on their position throughout the article.

It is advised that you place == References == as the second to last thing, just before categories, at the end of the article you are writing. The wiki tries to look for the References section to properly place the list of references.

You can use a particular reference multiple times. When you place a reference, a <ref>...</ref> code will be generated. the <ref> tags tells the wiki that the text inside of them is a reference. To use one reference several times, you will need to name it. This is done by editing the generated ref tags by adding name=... with ... being the unique name of the reference. For example you can make a reference that will look like this: <ref>DOE, John. On Editing a Wiki Article. Oxford Press, 2015</ref> and then add the name name="doe2015" so the reference looks like this: <ref name="doe2015">DOE, John. On Editing a Wiki Article. Oxford Press, 2015</ref>. If you want to use the reference again somewhere else, you just write <ref name="doe2015" /> and the reference will link to the original one. No need to write the whole reference again.

Creating quotes

You can use the following template to create a stylized quote:

<blockquote class="templatequote">
<p>Quote text.</p>
<cite><div class="templatequotecite">—Author, Source</div></cite>
</blockquote>

Advanced, Special characters

The Advanced button is used to display further available settings, like changing the heading level or making a list. What the individual buttons do should be self-explanatory. The Special characters list allows you to easily include characters you may not find on your keyboard. The Help button display short summary of wikitext markup and keywords you can use to format the text of the article you are writing.

If you need more information about wiki markup language, head to the MediWiki Help:Formatting page to learn more.

Saving an article

Before you save the article, please add a short summary of the changes you have made into the Summary: field. Deciding whether the change is a minor edit or not, is upon your own discretion. The rule of thumb usually is that if you fixed a typo, it's just a minor edit, but if you added a whole paragraph, then it's a regular edit. You can also mark the page to be added into your watch list, if you wish to closely inspect the changes other users may do in it.

If you are happy with the changes made, and you wrote the summary for them too (see above), you can save and publish the page by clicking on the Save page button.