Creating and Editing Articles

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

This wiki has the visual editor installed, which makes creating and editing articles very similar to editing a document in a simple word processor.

You can find the full manual for the visual editor here if you need further guidance.

Editing Articles

Each wiki page has edit and edit source tabs at the top of the page. These lets you edit the entire page. The edit link will normally load the visual editor, and the edit source link will take you to the traditional wiki markup editor.

Many pages also have edit links next to each section heading. These allow you to jump in and edit just that section.

The visual editor makes editing simple. Although it you want to dabble with the older style wiki markup editor 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 'brand' of wiki (mediawiki).

Images

One of the nice things about the wiki is that we can upload pictures to include in articles (or just so that you can link to them from usenet posts). 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

Equations and other maths related stuff

This wiki includes the "math" module, that enables you to include equations and other things with a mathematical style of presentation. So if you feel the need to include stuff like:

$x={\frac {-b\pm {\sqrt {b^{2}-4ac}}}{2a}}$

You can. Also the visual editor has lots of math related assistance built in to help you get what you want.

Creating Articles

You can create an article by searching for an article with the name you want to use. 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. So search again for 'Skim Plastering' rather than 'plastering' to create the article with the full 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 (Note DIY Wiki has a different agenda!)
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style
• Metawiki Guide to Article Formatting