Help:The Basics
News and Information for students
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[edit] Contribution guidelines
The Stiki is a student information resource written collaboratively by students.
It is our only aim to be the single biggest source of information on student life. Time to tell others what really goes on behind the scenes at your uni.
Even if you don't fancy creating a page from scratch, feel free to edit others content. Feel the football team holds more of a campus reputation for their social antics than foot skills? Here's where to say.
Here are some key things to bear in mind:
- Be Bold. If you have a view, talk about it, or even edit it!
- This isn't an essay, you arent going to be marked on it so be relaxed.. A bit of banter on the talk pages is as useful to a would be grad than the page itself...
- Don't be offended if people edit your content, that's what it's all about.
- It's a free directory of information, not a forum! No profanity, libel, or personal attacks will be tolerated.
- Sign your posts on talk pages by clicking on the signature icon. This will automatically produce your name and the date.
[edit] Finding content
[edit] Namespaces
Content on Wikipedia is segregated in order for it to be easier to find what you are looking for (imagine if you were searching on wikipedia for a song called "Help!" by the beatles and instead got five thousand articles on Help on Wikipedia? Not convenient eh?). To stop this, the Stiki segregates content into 'directories', a bit like the different directories you might organise your word docs into (except to confuse you it calls them namespaces).
To prevent this, wikipedia manages content through the following namespaces:
- 'Main' content (thats normal user articles on a department, club or soc etc.)
- 'Help' content (all articles related to Help)
- 'Images' content (all images are stored in this namespace)
- 'Media' content (all media files (.swf, .mp3 files etc) are stored in this namespace)
- 'Templates' content (templates are stored in this)
There are a number of other namespaces too for internal reasons.
Each namespace has a related namespace called 'talk'. On the talk pages here, if you want advice from other members (ie. advice on how to design a template) or if you want to discuss what is in that article this is where to go. Click here find out more on namespaces on Wikipedia.
[edit] Searching
When you use the search box, the search will automatically search the 'Main' namespace. It wont search news or feature stories contributed by our journalists and writers (to do that simply navigate to the Flisolo.com side of the site and use the search button in the top right corner there.)
If you don't want to search 'Main' stiki content, type your keyterm into the search box and change the dropdown box called 'namespace'
Most navigation as a viewer will be conducted using the "search" button box. For more info on how the search function works check out searching. Special:Search allows you to search with some restrictions.
[edit] Creating a new article
[edit] Using the Setup Wizard
Certain major categories of content have an associated set up wizard to make creating your page simple. This means that certain pieces of more complicated code (as in the case of creating a table) will be preloaded so you can simply fill in the missing gaps.
If you are using a setup wizard and some of the preloaded headings or content are not relevant, simply delete the code.
There are currently setup wizards for:
If the content you are looking to input does not have an associated setup wizard.
[edit] From scratch (without Wizard)
The main way to create a new entry is through typing the Stiki URL/New Article Title
eg.
http://mediawiki.flisolo.com/Warwick English Literature
If there is not an entry on this already, just click 'edit' to add your content. If you are creating an article from scratch, you should read our Best Practice article first.
You can also create a new page by sourcing words that are highlighted in red in already existing articles and clicking on them.
Once you have created the page, be sure to create redirects to your page from an associated term (eg. If your page is called University of Warwick, you might want to create a redirect from the title "Warwick Uni". To do this type:
#REDIRECT [[pagename]] under the word you think might be searched for, eg in the example mentioned; <#REDIRECT[[University of Warwick]]
[edit] Uploading files
You can upload the following file types to your Stiki page:
- .swf files (for flash videos)
- .mp3 files
- .jpeg, .png and .gif files
Files should be no more than 250MB.
To Upload the file
- In the sidebar, under toolbox, click "Upload file"
- Next to the Source filename, click Browse to locate the file on your computer.
- Fill in the Summary, if necessary.
- Click the Upload file button.
To then insert the file onto your page click on the "insert image" icon Image:Button image.jpg
If the image you are looking to insert is an image, you may wish to turn it into a thumbnail (an image with a border and subtext within it). To do this insert the file by typing:
[[Image:image.png|thumb|Caption text]]
[edit] Headings and subheadings
Your article should be broken into sections, each potentially with their own subheadings. To create sections simply write:
==section title==
As each subheading level down you go, you go, add an extra "=" sign, so the subheaing of one section would be:
===Subheading, L2 title===
====Subheading, L3 title====
There are a number of other things you can do to format your page. If you want to create a bulleted list, a numbered list of even a table see Help:Formatting
[edit] Links
There are 4 different types of link in Wikipedia.
- A link to another article on the Stiki
- A link to another news or feature story on Flisolo
- A link to an external website
- A link in a footnote
[edit] Linking to a Wikipedia article
Interwiki links are regarded as internal links and therefore need 2 pairs of square brackets [[ ]] around the instructions (external links only require one pair of brackets)
You might want to link to a Wikipedia article which if working properly would look like this.
eg:do you want to learn more about the BHS"
you would type
[[:Wikipedia:British Horse Society|BHS]]
- ":Wikipedia:"= directs the link to wikipedia. (The colon tells the Stiki to navigate away from the Stiki site).
- "British Horse Society"= Full title of Wikipedia article to be linked to including correct capital letters.
- "BHS"= Separated by the pipe character, this is the word that becomes the clickable link within the text.
[edit] Link to Flisolo article
To link to a flisolo article simply type in the instruction[[Flisolo:Name of page]]
[edit] External links
An external link will look like this:
Check out another website: [1] for more details on books. (Note how the arrow illustrates you are moving away from the site?)
A single pair of brackets [ ] is used to create an external link. External links use absolute URLs to link directly to another website. eg [www.timesonline.co.uk].
Links without square brackets will be displayed in their entirety: http://www.example.org.
[edit] Creating a footnote
The tag <ref>footnoted text</ref> indicates the text it contains should be a reference (footnote). You should embed this code into the main body of the text.
You must also create a section called 'notes' and embed the term <references></references>in order for it to pick up there references in the main body and list them as notes
<ref>{{Cite web|URL=(title of link)|title= title of link}}</ref>
So to create a link that looks like this:
The club has a Riding Club Website.
which contains information on team members, and photos of the team in action.
You should have both a link within the article and the link cited in the references; So long as you have created a 'Notes' section in the article. (by creating that section called 'Notes' and putting the term <reference/> in it), you will also have the reference at the bottom of your article that looks a bit like this:
Notes.
1. ↑ University of Warwick Riding Club.
[edit] Linking to an article or news story in the Flisolo main site
You might find that there is an article on the Flisolo site that is related to what you are doing. To link to this article , use the instructions.
[http://flisolo.com/node-640-news|more fee paying students at top unis]
[edit] Categorising your article
All Stiki content needs to be categorised. Content must be placed into one of the following categories:
- Money (includes wiki content on anything finance or budget related)
- Lifestyle (Gap years, travel, accommodation etc)
- Work (work and careers etc.)
- Play (social life, sport, clubs and societies, places to eat, drink, clubs, films, plays etc.)
- University (Department entries, lecturer entries, the university, halls etc)
This allows the content to be put into the 'most read, most edited, most active' wikipedia page information on each channel page.
If you are unsure which category to put your article, create a talk page for the article and other users will guide you.
To categorise an article simply write:
<[[Category:Money]] (or of course living/ home etc depending on the category.)
[edit] Help
There are 8 namespaces that contain content. Having seperate namespaces for different types of content will enable you to search for content efficiently. When you search for content it will automatically search for articles in the "main" namespace. To specifically search for Help articles, refine your search to include articles in the "Help" namespace.
There are more detailed user guides in the help namespace organised by content type. You can access even omre detailed guidelines on the Wikipedia/Help:namespaces namespace.
[edit] Templates
Templates help to arrange content in an interesting, and efficient way. Certain elements of content, such as the information box, or even certain tables can be created using a template. Although the basic info (words etc.) will be in the main page, if there is a template attached to it, the whole table will be formatted in a particlar way.
To apply a temple to your page type in {{{Template Name content content content}}} around the content which you want to apply the template to.
You might see something on one page that you want to have on yours (an information box might be the classic example). You can also check out popular templates through looking at "special pages" in the left hand box and clicking on "popular templates". To view all other templates to apply them to your page navigate to "Special Pages", all templates
in the namespace "Template". The dropdown menu enables you to choose which namespace you are referring to.
You may wish to build your won template from scratch. Detailed information on how to do this can be found on the Wikipedia Help Page
[edit] Contesting Content
The 'talk' tab at the top of the article allows you to discuss with contributors the content of the site