Main Page

The purpose of this Wiki installation is to give everyone who is interested an opportunity to try it out and provide feedback.

I suggest you try posting some articles. If you want to keep a backup of content you've created you can copy the contents of the edit box for the page into a text file on your own computer. If we decide to use this cms, we may want to wipe it clean and start afresh -- YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

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.

The thing we really need to assess is whether this provides a suitable platform for publishing the type of diy faq articles we were discussing.

Please make sure you are accessing this wiki by its current address: http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/

Navigation

• 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 (and for sad anal tidiness freaks :-)) 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.

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You can discuss this wiki on the talk (discussion) page