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This wiki is intended to provide a resource for all those into Do It Yourself (DIY). DIY includes a vast range of subjects, with the common factor of ordinary people doing jobs for themselves that are within their abilities but which they would otherwise have to employ others to do for them. Another common factor is that many such jobs require the DIY-er to expand their skills and understanding - sometimes quite rapidly - to carry out the job successfully. Since a third factor is that many such jobs have already been tackled by other DIYers it is useful to learn from the experience of others. In the UK the uk.d-i-y newsgroup has for many years been a valuable resource for exchanging information and, like many newsgroups, it has for many years had a web-based FAQ containing articles contributed and edited by a few individual 'regulars' of the group. Since wikis are by their nature very DIY websites this uk.d-i-y wiki was perhaps inevitable ...
The wiki was first put up on a trial basis, but appears to be sufficiently popular to become a permanent feature. However it is still in its infancy so:
- the range of subjects covered is patchy
- most articles are the work of only one or two people: this means they may carry particular bias(es) of the author(s). (Viewing a page's history tab shows how the page has been edited and how many people have contributed to the process).
It is hoped that as more people find it a useful resource more will be inclined to contribute their own particular skills - whether that is in the form of writing new articles, improving existing ones or even pointing out where improvements need to be made (in content or in clarity).
- No login is required to post new articles or edit existing ones, but feel free to create a login if you wish. It helps people see who's created what.
- You can discuss this wiki on the talk (discussion) page
- You can use the search function (in left sidebar) to find anything (e.g. 'boilers')
- Here is a list of all categories of article
- Here is a list of all pages in the wiki
Contributing
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. OK 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. Perhaps we should follow Wikipedia's naming convention [[1]] especially regarding capitalisation of article names and whether they should be in the singular or plural [[2]]
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.