Help:Manual
This is an overview page that helps you getting familiar to work with a wiki. For a short history and introduction about the choice for a wiki for Beyond Social, read the Wiki Introduction.
Contents
Account creation
In order to start contributing to BS wiki, like in most wikis, you need to create a user account. Do so by clicking on Create Account, in the top right corner or the wiki,
You'll be taken to a page where you will be asked your account details, a question to see if you are not a robot — as you guessed the answer is Design.
Tip: if you don't want to publish under your real name, use a pseudonym or your student number.
User page
Your user page is a personal page in the wiki where you can leave information about yourself, leave notes or do some tests with the wiki syntax. An easy way to add a user profile to your page is by using the following form: Form:Profile.
Preferences
You can make changes to your wiki experience in the preferences menu. You can find it at the top-right of the screen.
Confirmed email-address
One of the features that you can activate are email updates. With this setting enabled, you receive a short update mail whenever one of the pages in your watchlist is edited by someone else. To enable this feature, you need to have a confirmed email-address connected to your account. To do this, go to the preference menu and scroll down until you see the email options.
page creation
How to create an article? If you want to say something about something for which there isn't a page, you create that page and start writing its content.
To create a new article:
- go to the Main Page
- scroll down to "Contribute"
- use the input field to write the title of your new article
- click on "create article"
editing
How to write on the wiki? Writing on a wiki is not not very different from writing a blog. You have a Read and Edit mode. Edit lets you enter content and make changes to existing content. While you are editing, you can preview your changes in the Preview window. Once done editing save the page, otherwise your contribution will be lost.
However, one big difference with normal blogs is the wiki's history tracking function. Every edit that is been done in the wiki is tracked, and visible for reader and writers. Under the button "View history" you can see how the wiki page has been changed over time. Also, the special page Recent Changes lists the recent actitivy on the wiki. Read more about the characteristics of a wiki in the page about Mediawiki software.
We suggest that you experiment with writing and formating your own User page. You can get to this page by clicking in your username, next to the little person drawing. The user page, is normally used to say something about you, but can also be a nice testing ground.
Syntax
Although there is a specific syntax to format the text, you can use the menu to do much of the formating you need. In case you are interested to get to know the syntax here is cheat-sheet with the most important syntax.
Basics
A few basics:
- '''word''' == word
- ''word'' == word
- <u>word</u> or <ins>word</ins> == word
- <del>word</del> or <s>word</s> ==
word
Note: to create line breaks you need to leave at least one empty space between one line of text and the next.
Headings
You can make titles with different hierarchic levels by using "=" as follows:
=Main Title=
==Sub Title==
===Sub-sub Title===
===Sub-sub-sub Title===
You can place content under each of these sections.
Signature
There is a nice function in the wiki that is used to end a message with your name: a signature. If you type "~~~" or "~~~~" it will create a signature with your name or name+time.
~~~~ creates Manetta (talk) 14:33, 9 February 2017 (CET)
Images
You probably want not only to write, but also to use images, audio and video on the pages you'll be developing. Wiki allows the following formats:
| Medium | Formats |
|---|---|
| image | png, gif, jpg, jpeg, svg |
| audio | ogg, mp3 |
| video | ogv, webm, mp4 |
Note: The wiki can only include images that have been uploaded.
uploading:
There are two ways in which you can upload an image:
- upload your image on the upload page
- Go to the upload page
- Upload your image
- use the
icon in the text editor - minimum width: 750px, maximum width: 1920px
- Click on 'Upload' to select an image, and confirm that you can publish this file under the license.
- Set the alignment of the image and the format.
- Write a caption that will be displayed under the images.
- Click 'insert', and the following syntax will appear:
[[File:myimage.png|My caption]]
Attention: always leave an empty line before and after an image, no matter if it is preceded or followed by another image or text
image captions:
Captions can also be added to images by using a vertical bar:
[[File:myimage.jpg|Caption under the image]]
Video
To include videos in the wiki we use the EmbedVideo extension. There are different syntaxes that can be used. The shortest one is the following.
{{#ev:service|id}}
For example:
{{#ev:youtube|mL9hRH-ZU1c}}
Where the id comes from the link of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL9hRH-ZU1c
Results in:
Keeping track
How does one keeps track of changes? Add them to your watchlist! To do this, you can click on the Watch button in the sidebar.
If you have a confirmed email-address linked to your user account, the wiki will send you update mails whenever a change is made in one of the articles that you are watching.
Help
there are several ways to ask for help in editing.
- Mediawiki
- the website on Mediawiki (the software on which Beyond Social wiki runs) provides a lot of information: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
- visit the Publication Station
- send an email to: info@beyond-social.org