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Primer for Creating Pages

This version was saved 13 years, 9 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Cyd
on June 21, 2010 at 12:35:13 pm
 

Want to create pages? Want to be awesome, like me? It's not as hard as it seems, brosef!


Basic Formatting

If you look at any properly done Wikipedia article you'll see that the information is carefully arranged into sections. This is the best way to keep information organized and useful for a reader. Luckily it's not difficult to use, either from the beginning or when renovating an article.

 

The Table of Contents

A properly utilized Table of Contents will help you keep your article organized and clean. Adding one to a page is quite simple. From the edit page, click the "Insert Plugin" icon. It will pop up a small window. Mouse over "Page Info" and select "Table of Contents". Hit next a couple of times (you don't need to bother changing settings), and it will drop a little green box into your edit window. This is where the Table of Contents will reside on your page. You don't need to worry about manually filling in the information because it will automatically update. You just have to use headers to tell it what to update with.

 

Headers and You

If you look to the toolbar at the top of the editing window, you'll see a little dropdown that typically says "Normal". This is how you create section headers like the one just above, and these section headers will automatically be updated in the Table of Contents. Add your title before each section of text, and then highlight it. Then go to that dropdown and choose your heading size. You can see an example of how that works on this page: the "Basic Formatting" is set as Heading 1, while "The Table of Contents" and "Headers and You" are Heading 2.  Do you see in the Table of Contents how these Heading 2 sections are treated as subsections? It does that automatically for you.

 

Regarding Images

Well of course you'll want your article to have that certain something, you'll want it to pop, you want pizazz! It's pretty easy to do. First things first: make sure it's already the right size for what's appropriate. Don't upload some huge, unnecessary image (as I have accidentally done once or twice) that takes up the whole screen. 400 pixels wide or tall is usually a good upper boundary. If you need finer detail than that, zoom in and crop it. It's not hard to do so in a simple editing program like Paint. Important: Please do all that you can to ensure that you have permission to use the images you are uploading. Any violations will be taken down by the editors upon complaint.

 

Uploading v. Linking

When you're editing an article, you'll see a box on the right. One of the headers there says "Images and Files". At the top is the option to Upload one, and at the bottom is the option to insert a URL. It'll usually take care of the rest for you.

 

Fixing that ugly block crap

So you've inserted your image but it's not in the right place, and there's all that fugly white space to the side where text could go, but it won't. What do you do? You need to edit in a source code snippet to block it off to one side, and it's quite easy. This is the bit you use:

 

<img style="border: 1px solid #000000; margin: 5px; float: right;" src="f/fans.jpg" alt="" />

 

If you've uploaded your image, then just change the 'fans.jpg' part to your filename (keep the f/ bit). Where it says float: right, just change that to left if you want it on the other side. Note that if you have one alongside the table of contents, as I like to do, ALWAYS keep it on the right. This wiki doesn't seem to like having an image on the left right there. Otherwise it's fine to go left if you'd like.

 

Please Use Tags

On the upper right of every article you'll see a list of "Tags" to which the page is assigned. Tags are simply a way to keep several articles grouped together for easy reference. For instance, this page is tagged with "tips". If you click that tag, you'll get a listing of all of the other pages tagged as "tips". This is helpful for users who need to find other articles with similar information, but it is also useful for admins and contributors to the site. We can tag items as "needs work" for articles that aren't up to snuff, or as "outdated" or "archived" for conventions from years past, if we need to maintain old data.

 

Tagging your article is simple, and important. At the bottom of the editing page you'll see a small link titled "Edit Tags". When you click that it will switch to an edit mode. It lists all of the currently used tags to make it easier on you: just click the ones you think are appropriate and it adds them. From here you can also add your own tags, separated by a comma. When you save the page, it will automatically updated the tag lists.

 

Please Use Correct Tags

Tags are very useful but they only remain useful as articles get correctly tagged. For instance, if you label an article about the Red Cross Blood Drive as "parking", that doesn't help anyone. This is part of a concept called "garbage in, garbage out," or "GIGO". If you screw up the tags, then they stop helping us organize articles.

 

When you tag your article please be sure you're using appropriate tags. If you're creating a new tag, try to make sure there's nothing else already serving that purpose (for instance, as I type this there are tags for "programming" and "programming tracks", which are the same thing... we'll have to decide which to remove). But with that said, don't be shy about creating new ones if there's a genuine use for them.

 

 

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