User:Salak/Wiki Ethos

RETIRED

Brief

Cmdr Varaan & Lt.JG. Salak,

I’ve recently encountered one or two incidents amongst players in the fleet who feel their wiki page has been wrongly edited by someone who did not have their permission.

There seems, therefore, to be a little confusion as to the ethos of the SB118 wiki, particularly in terms of it being a collaborative project which any member of the UFoP community can use and contribute to.

I wondered if perhaps the two of you as wiki moderators might be willing to get your heads together and draft an OOC that might be sent out to all the Fleet’s Captains (or indeed to everyone in the fleet) educating (or reminding) them of the exact ethos behind the wiki. Particular emphasis presumably being on collaboration and working together/ everyone having a go. Perhaps if you have guidelines on any unusual instances when one should ask permission of a user to make an edit or perhaps any observations on etiquette?

I think this would be valuable to the fleets players and indeed perhaps we could have it edited and made into one of the “sim tutorials” such as those we already have on the main SB-118 site.

Hoping you can help,

Capt. Rocar.

Draft

I'm drafting this as an over-arching guide to the wiki, including pretty much everything I can think of. If we want to cut bits out to specialise it to the criteria Capt. Rocar has asked for, we can always do that. - Jay^Talk 13:06, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Many of you by now know of the 118wiki, which with over 2,500 articles compiled in less than 4 years, has become an invaluble resource within the group we all know and love. However, as more members of our group are becoming involved in editing this resource, we felt now would be the right time to try and guide people as to how to aid with its growth whilst also hopefully avoiding stepping on peoples toes.

The principles of a wiki are that the format makes it accessable to everyone and that anybody can edit it. In the case of our wiki, anybody with an account can edit almost any page, with only a couple of exceptions such as the Main Page which are only able to be edited by Admins. To set up an account, click the "Log in/create account" button in the top right and follow the instructions given.

We've seen several people stating that they can't edit the wiki as they are "wiki-illiterate". Editing is really quite simple. At the top of each entry on the wiki are several buttons and we shall detail what each do.

Article (or User Page): This button displays the entry as it currently stands.

Discussion: This shows the articles talk page, where issues about the article can be raised and where people can talk about possible future changes to improve the article.

Edit: The key to any wiki, this button allows you to alter the text, formatting, etc within the entry. We'll come back to this but don't be too daunted by it.

History: One that it seems a lot of people skip over. This button shows an edit log for the page. For each line, "cur" compares that edit to the current entry, "last" compares the edit to the entry before to display what was changed. Clicking on the date allows you to view the article as it looked when that edit was completed and then the name links to the user page of the editor. A small "m" signifies an edit marked as "minor" whilst if you are using the similarly arranged "Recent changes" page (link in the left menus), a capital "N" signifies a new article.

Move: This button allows you to move the article to be filed under a different title. This is not usually advised unless you are certain the page should be moved, such as when you've created the page but made a typo in the title.

Watch: In the top left, when you are logged in, there's a button titled "my watchlist". If you click on the watch button, or tick the "watch this page" option when editing a page, then the last edit of the entry will appear on your "my watchlist" page whenever you check it. This is generally used to track certain articles to see what others are doing to edit it and thus is used either to collaborate with others in rewriting articles or to more quickly spot vandalism on your most frequented pages so that you can revert by using the History button used above, selecting a previous entry, clicking edit to select the archived text and then saving that thus turning the page back to the previous version.