From New Telemark Guide
The following guide contains some helpful information for getting started with adding to or editing the New Telemark Guide, especially if you've never used a MediaWiki before. Please take a few minutes to read it completely, as many of us have spent hours working on this site, and it can only take a few seconds to muck it up.
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Wiki Basics
- A wiki is a way to present information, like an encyclopedia. What we're doing here is creating a knowledge base in the most intuitive and relational way we can, to make the most useful reference possible for telemark skiers or those interested in telemark.
- MediaWiki is immensely powerful, but we'll really only need a small subset of its features. In general, w can assume a flat relationship between pages, no namespaces other than the defaults.
- Anyone can edit any page. Take this seriously-- You could wipe out someone else's hard work with a poorly executed edit. You can also correct minor mistakes or add to an existing entry.
- If you want to contest or dispute the content of a page, start a discussion on it by clicking the Discussion link. This allows some discourse on that page specifically to determine a resolution. Do not make a major change to a page if you disagree with it before first starting a discussion. If you want to have that discussion on telemarktips.com, that is cool too.
- "Special" pages are reserved for system functions like Help, or reports. All Special pages have the "Special:" prefix.
- My Talk and User Talk pages are sort of a blog type function. You can add info about yourself, or other users can comment. It's a rudimentary form of inter-wiki communication between users.
Creating New Pages
There is no "Create Page" button or link, which can be a little confusing at first. Creating a page can be accomplished like this:
- Make sure a page doesn't already exist for the page content you plan to add. Use the search.
- Define a link in an existing page, then once you've saved that page, click the newly created link. It takes you to a page that asks if you want to Edit that new page. Add some content, click Save, and *Boom* you have a new page.
- An alternate way to create a page is to simply append the URL with your new page title and hit Enter. You'll be presented with the same dialog to create/edit the new page.
Wikitext - The Wiki-specific Text Formatting Language
- The syntax for MediaWiki is different, but just as simple as the BBCode that is used in forums. Instead of bracketed open and close tags like [img][/img], "wikitext" uses a completely different approach. This is really difficult to explain, so I suggest viewing the source code of some of the existing pages, or even some Wikipedia.org pages.
- Also, visit this help page for some basics in performing commons layout tasks like images, tables, links, etc.
- Some features on Wikipedia are custom and I'll have to install extensions to make them work.
Best Practices
- Try to tag your newly created pages with a category. You can add category membership to pages by simply adding a [[Category:Tailwheel]] tag at the bottom. You can add as many as you like. After a while the category list page will become a useful index: Special:Categories
- Do your best to use hierarchical headings and ordered/unordered lists. Headings are defined with the ==Heading== syntax. Two equal signs is the top level, and 3 equal signs is the next level down, etc. A Table of Contents will automatically be created on your page from these headings if you have more than 3. Ordered lists use # and unordered lists use *. You can see this usage in the Recommended Modifications page.
- Make links in your pages to stuff you think is relevant. If you can't make the pages for those links, someone will come along and do it eventually, but defining the link, even if it's a dead end, is a good way to define what further work needs to be done.
- Any questions about syntax stuff, just click the Edit tab on a given page, and view existing syntax to see how it was done. You can always email info[a t]newtelemarkguide.com for help.