Creating and Editing Articles

This article is a guide to creating and editing articles in the uk.d-i-y wiki.

Editing Articles

Each wiki page has an edit tab at the top of the page. This lets you edit the entire page, including such elements as categories.

Many pages also have edit links at the right of the page, opposite section headings. These allow you to edit just that section.

In each case you can edit text quite simply (e.g. correcting typos) but if you want to add to or change the structure substantially you will need to know a bit about wiki markup.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing is probably the canonical reference on editing this 'make' of wiki (mediawiki) although this particular installation may differ from the examples given at wikimedia.org, depending on how this installation has been configured.

Images

One of the nice things about the wiki is that we can upload pictures to include in articles. However the wiki seems to keep all uploaded images in one pool (Special:Imagelist), so if we're to be able to manage this we probably need to pay a bit of attention to the names we give to the image files. So instead of, say, boiler.jpg followed by boiler2.jpg ... boiler1001.jpg maybe we could name them like Boiler_Worcester-Bosch_Greenstar_Junior_24i_front_outside_view.jpg. That's a bit of a mouth (or keyboard)-full but we'll probably all be grateful by the time we get to Wikipedia size :-) Supplying a meaningful description when we upload images should also help.

For help on how to include images in articles this page is useful: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images

Creating Articles

You can create an article by trying to view an article of that name. If it doesn't exist, you are given the chance to create it. So say you want to create an article about plastering. Put the word "plastering" in the search box and click go. If that article doesn't exist, you get a link to create it. (You may want to consider re-submitting the query for the exact title of the article you want to create since it's not so straightforward to change existing titles in the wiki. So search again for 'Plastering' rather than 'plastering' to create the article with the title Capitalised.)

Naming

When referring to one article from another it helps to have a consistent naming convention. Unlike Wikipedia's naming convention [[1]] this Wiki seems to have evolved its own de facto convention:

• Use plural form for article names about classes of things e.g. Round Tuits
• Capitalise first word and main words in article names e.g. Where to get Round Tuits

Here is an example article. It contains an example of the structure and many of the formatting markups you may want in an article, which you can use as a template.

Copyright

All contributions to this Wiki are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License. For more information see Project:Copyrights.

See Also

Some of Wikipedia's help pages are more-or-less applicable and/or helpful for this Wiki:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style
• Metawiki Guide to Article Formatting