Project:Primordial Guide to Contributing to Wiki

This is the absolute beginnings of a guide to contributing to this wiki.

If you can't find an answer here (or even if you are a little afraid to try), you can always head over to the Site Feedback and Help category in the :Talk forum and just ask for help!

Keep in Mind...

• Anyone (that can access SunshinePPS) can read the wiki; there are no private wiki content pages.
  • However, there are "Special Pages" which have restricted access. For example, the list of Pages with the fewest revisions is only available to logged-in users, and the list of registered users is only available to system administrators.
• Only logged-in users can write to the wiki. You may need to click the "Log in" button in the upper-right corner.
  • And, only a user can write to that user's own "user page(s)" in the User namespace.
  • And, writing to some pages can be restricted to users in particular groups.
• The wiki keeps track of the history of each page. This means you don't have to worry too much about screwing something up, because you can always revert back to an earlier version. 😌

Basic Structure of the Wiki

• The wiki is a collection of pages.
• Every page has a name. Page names are both case-sensitive and case-preserving.
  • I.e., "Too many kittens" is treated as a different name than "Too Many Kittens".
• Every pages belongs to a namespace, which defines the overall function/purpose of the page. Some example namespaces:
  • The main namespace is where basic content goes, e.g., all the pages about education-related stuff.
  • The User namespace is for user-owned pages.
  • The Project namespace is for documentation about this project itself.
  • (There are plenty more namespaces, and they are almost all important, but it would be overwhelming to list them all here.)
• A page's name is prefixed with its namespace --- except for the main namespace, which is so ubiquitous that it doesn't actually even have a name. E.g., "Too Many Kittens" is in the main namespace, but "Project:Conventions for cat content" is in the Project namespace.
• Every namespace is paired up with a talk namespace, e.g. "Talk" for the main namespace and "Project talk" for the "Project" namespace. This is what allows every page to be paired up with a "Discussion" page, which is a place for users to discuss (or comment on, or argue about) the contents of that page.
• A Category is something else --- it's a kind of tag that can be applied to a page. Pages can be tagged with multiple categories. (Each category is itself defined by a page in the Category namespace.)

Creating a new page

In general, the easiest way to create a new page is to decide on a name and then just type that name into the search bar. At the top of the search results, the wiki will provide a helpful link for Create the page "XXX" on this wiki! (unless a page with that name already exists). If you want to create a page in a non-main namespace, be sure the add the prefix to the name.

Pages for SOM entities --- like a page for a School --- need to be created in a different way. For such pages, find the appropriate Entity category, and there will be a text-entry box where you can enter the name of the entity/page that you want to create. This will take you to a form that will handle structuring the page data correctly.

Page Naming Rules/Conventions

Things to Know

• Names are both case-preserving and case-sensitive. (I.e., capital letters make a difference.)
• Avoid forward-slashes / in names.
  • A forward-slash creates a subpage (which, on the other hand, is how you create subpages to your own user-page).
  • Q: What is the alternative, if a name should have a slash?
  • Q: When is it appropriate to create/use subpages?
• Avoid colons : in names.
  • A colon is used as the separator for the namespace prefix.
  • Q: What is the alternative, if a name should have a colon?
• Page names can be changed if needed, so don't let obsessing over a name keep you from creating a page.

Things to Do

• For named entities (things with names, proper nouns), try to use the appropriately capitalized full/official name.
  • E.g.:
    • "Leodis V. McDaniel High School", instead of "McDaniel HS"
    • "Superintendent's Advisory Committee on Enrollment and Transfer", instead of "SACET"
  • redirects can always be created later on to link common abbreviations or acronyms to the full name.
• For non-proper-noun titles...
  • Q: What kind of capitalization conventions do we want?

Tips for Wikitext

• The most important markup on a wiki page is links to other pages! You can create a link simply by writing the page's name, surrounded by square brackets:
  • [[Project:Contents]] → Project:Contents
• It is perfectly ok to add a link to a non-existent page, if it names a page that should exist (i.e., when you or someone else eventually writes it). This will create a "red link"; when someone clicks on a red link, they will be able to create that page.
  • [[Some Non-existent Page]] → Some Non-existent Page
• There will be times that you want the text shown by a link to be different from the name of the page it links to. This can be accomplished by a vertical bar | within the link:
  • see the [[Project:Contents|contents page]] → "see the contents page"

This is often handy to change capitalization to fit into a sentence better.

• Instead of a red link, it is also ok to create a "stub page", a page that is nearly empty that captures some idea you have in very rough form but clearly needs more work. Do this by adding {{notice:stub page}} on a line by itself.
  • Note the use of curly braces (not square brackets).
  • This will put a helpful, standard notice on the page, warning readers that the page needs more content.
  • This will also add the page to Category:Pages that are stubs, which makes it easy to find all stub pages.
• You can indicate a "stub section" within a page in a similar way. Use {{notice:stub section}} on a line by itself.

• To add a category tag to a page, simply add a link to the category anywhere in the page:
  • [[Category:Arts and Music]]

This will put the page in that category, and will also add a link to the category at the bottom of the page.

• If you just want to show a link to a category (as you would with a regular page link), without tagging the page with that category, then you need to do the magic trick of prepending a colon (:) to the category name:
  • [[:Category:Arts and Music]] → Category:Arts and Music

Citations and referencing sources

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Uploading Files/Documents/Media

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Watching pages

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User pages and sandboxes

Most pages on SunshinePPS:Wiki belong to the community. They can be edited by anyone and they represent the collective consensus of all contributors. The exceptions to this are user pages, i.e., pages in the User namespace. By convention/policy, user pages belong to individual users, and the editorial requirements are more relaxed on these pages. The wiki will only allow user pages to be edited by their individual owning users.

A user page has a name that looks like "User:USERNAME". For example, the user page for user "Example" is User:Example. Only someone logged-in as "Example" can create or edit this page.

All subpages of a user page also belong to the same user and follow the same rules. For example, User:Example/Essays/Dog Poop is Bad for Playgrounds would be a page that belongs to user "Example". Subpages are generally not used in the main area of the wiki, but they are welcome in the User namespace. Subpages allow each user to have their own hierarchical/folder structure of pages.

By convention, the "/sandbox" subpage (e.g., User:Example/sandbox) is considered to be a user's "sandbox"; it's their own personal space to build and experiment with temporary structures. Your sandbox is a place to play with wikitext and try things out, without cluttering up the history of other pages, and with no expectation (by anyone else) that anything will stick around or is meaningful in any way. A "/sandbox" can have its own subpages (e.g., User:Example/sandbox/abc), and they are all considered to be sandbox pages.

Like every other page on the wiki, each user page has an associated discussion page, accessed via the "Discussion" link at the top of the page. These discussion pages can be edited by anyone; they are the wiki-way for other users to ask you questions about your user pages. In fact, the discussion page for your top-level user page is the mechanism for users asking questions about you. (Public questions, that is, since nothing on the wiki is private. If another user wants to contact you directly, they could also send a personal message via SunshinePPS:Talk.)

Navigating to your own user pages

When you are logged-in, the user menu in the upper right-hand corner of every page has three shortcuts to user-related pages:

• "YourUsername" (whatever "YourUsername" happens to be) takes you to your user page;
• "My Discussion" takes you to your "user discussion" page;
• "Sandbox" takes you to your sandbox page.

If any of these pages does not exist yet, you will be offered the opportunity to create it when you visit it.

Using links to "special" pages, it is possible to recreate and embed these menu shortcuts into the text of other pages:

• [[Special:MyPage]] → Special:MyPage → user page of current user
• [[Special:MyTalk]] → Special:MyTalk → talk page of current user
• [[Special:MyPage/sandbox]] → Special:MyPage/sandbox → sandbox page of current user