TechWiki talk:Wiki editing tutorial

Merging editing tutorial with guidelines

I realize some of the content here overlaps with the instruction in LDSTech:Guidelines. Eventually I'd like to merge these two pages. --Tom Johnson 22:23, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't necessarily agree that merging these is the right direction. I think there is some content on the LDSTech:Guidelines page that belongs here, but I see three mostly distinct topics:

• Rules to follow (capitalization, introductions, headings, etc.)
• A wikitext tutorial
• Special templates and other helps unique to LDSTech

Currently the Guidelines page covers the first and third points. This new editing tutorial covers a bit of the first point, but mostly covers the second. Our position in the past has been to point people to the MediaWiki help pages for wikitext help (such as in Help:Contents. I guess we can try to duplicate that, but I don't see what's wrong with a link.

I'm curious where this came from. The capitalized headings makes me think it was lifted from some other source, but the errors make me wonder....

-- 22:56, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

I forgot about the capitalized headings. I'll fix that. I wrote this content a couple of years ago on the ldshelp wiki. That wiki has been more or less discontinued except for the Integrated Catalog content, which is still being used by the Church Library people.

I know we can copy in help files from Mediawiki that are in the public domain. I wouldn't mind doing that, if you want. We can also just point people to links on other sites, but those articles tend to be comprehensive and perhaps intimidating. I added this page to accompany the simple mediawiki presentation I'm giving on Friday at the LDSTech Conference. --Tom Johnson 23:00, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Just demonstrating.--Tom Johnson 16:20, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

E-mail preferences

In the 'Setting your e-mail preferences' section, you give an example of your user page to teach about emailing another user, but the option to email you isn't in the footer. This might cause some confusion. --User:gpaigem 18:00, 2 April 2012

The whole point of that section is that people need to set their e-mail preferences so that the option to e-mail them will appear in the Toolbox. It does appear in Tom Johnson's user page, so I don't think that was particularly confusing. But I did add another clause to make it clear that if users don't set their preferences properly, the option for "E-mail this user" won't even appear in the Toolbox, and that is why you won't be able to send them e-mail. -- Aebrown 00:51, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't see an 'Email this user' option in the footer of Tom Johnson's user page. The wiki states "scroll to the Toolbox section of the footer and click E-mail this user." I don't see 'Email this user' whether or not I'm logged in. I see an email address in the contact information manually added on the user page, but not in the footer. Maybe I'm not the only one? --User:gpaigem 14:09, 3 April 2012

Figured out the miscommunication. A user will only see the 'Email this user' option on someone else's user page if they have also added their email to My Preferences. That wasn't really clear; the wiki sounds like a user would be able to email others depending on if others have email addresses added, but it matters that the user has one added as well. If that makes sense. --User:gpaigem 14:18, 3 April 2012

Creating pages

I can imagine the 'Creating pages' exercise to get confusing in that they aren't supposed to really create a page. Also the 'Deleting pages' exercise. --User:gpaigem 18:10, 2 April 2012

Some confusion is possible, but we don't want people creating a bunch of pointless pages that they are powerless to remove. That would just create a lot of work for administrators to clean up. -- Aebrown 00:51, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Special pages

I don't really understand Special Pages. --User:gpaigem 18:10, 2 April 2012

Special Pages do all sorts of, well, special things. They do such a wide variety of things that it's difficult to give a simple definition. But you can find a pretty good explanation, and a brief description of the special pages on Meta at Help:Special page. -- Aebrown 00:51, 3 April 2012 (UTC)