Help on Editing
Like most things, it's just a matter of practice.
How to create an article
To create a new article you need:
If you don't know how to produce the text formatting you want, have a look at a cheat sheet. Alternatively edit an existing page that has the formatting you want, to give you an idea on how it is done. You can also look in Wikipedia for examples. Help for more complex tasks and full on details.
You can practice text formatting and editing in the sand box first. Anything written in the sand box is not retained - it's solely for practice purposes.
After that try fixing a spelling mistakei or adda sentence or two, to the existing articles in this wiki. There is an edit button at the top of each page for all of the pages contents and also an edit button beside each subsection. The edit buttons only appear once you are logged in. When editing your article always Preview your article and be very careful to make use of the Save Page button. You can abandon your edits if necessary by canceling the edit page or by using your browser's back button.
Another good place to start is your own page. It will be listed here: Our Authors' Pages. Click on your own page and start editing. Don't be shy - give it a go.
Remember every single word you type can be viewed and/or resurrected at any time by most users. So be careful what you write - it is public. Do not submit any copyrighted text or images.
When ready to create a complete article type a name for the article in the box below and press the Create Article button. The article name should be concise, as it may end up being displayed in the menus if you choose so later.
You can then edit the menu itself to add in a reference to your new article. Once that's done you may need to refresh your browser to see any changes you made to the menu. Note that your article doesn't have to be in the menu. It could just be referenced from an existing page ie as a sub article. The top menu bar can be altered here. Please don't add to the menus unnecessarily.
This page shows the names of articles that we want created. If you know something about the topic, click on the red links on that page and start creating the article. You can upload photos but keep them to under 150kB.
Edit this page to change the menu bar at the top of the page: Top navigation bar
Photos need to be kept to a reasonable size, as large ones chew up our server space and take longer to download as well. It is recommended that files are no larger than 150 kB. Any larger will result in an upload warning. Most cameras use a 1:1.333 aspect ratio. So a typical camera may produce these sort of image sizes:
- 2592 x 1944 pixels - average jpg size abt 1.40 mB
- 2272 x 1704 pixels - average jpg size abt 1.07 mB
So the photos from you camera need to be resized before uploading. Here are the sizes typically used so far on this website:
- 267 x 200 - example - average about 60 kBytes - filename indicates photo was rotated
- 400 x 300 - example - average about 100 kBytes
- 600 x 450 - example - average about 250 kBytes - will trigger an upload warning but size is still reasonable.
Wide angle cameras typically have a 1:1.5 aspect ratio ie the traditional 6" by 4" photographic film size eg in pixels
- 3101 x 2067
These images should preferably be reduced to:
- 300 x 200
- 450 x 300
- 675 x 450
A resized image should have its dimensions appended to its filename to differentiate it from the original image and so that its size is readily known. Eg an image called IMG_5729.jpg would be named IMG_5729_267_200.jpg once resized. A rotated image has "_r1" prepended eg IMG_5729_r1_267_200.jpg
Free, no strings attached image manipulation software "Irfanview", can be downloaded from their website. Software includes resizing functionality and is highly recommended. A resizing demonstration - note that the software has a batch mode so you can do a pile of images at once.
Upload the image first
How do I place an image on a wiki page? First you need to upload the images to the wiki itself, so they can be referred to. So here we go:
- Log on to wiki.
- Click on the link that says "Upload file" seen at the very bottom of any of the Wiki pages.
- Dial up your image using the browse button next to the "Source filename" entry box on the Upload page.
- Select your file/image using the file browser.
- No need to rename it, so leave the "Destination filename" entry box empty.
- A summary is not compulsory but provides some background info about the image if you want for future reference.
- No need to do anything else except to click on the "Upload file" button and wait patiently for it to upload.
- You may well be warned about the file size being too large but you can command it to continue regardless (typical happens for an image size of 600 x 450).
- When it's done uploading it will show the image on the screen - be patient.
- If nothing happens after say 10 minutes you have done something wrong!!
- Assuming it all worked and the picture is showing, repeat the process for any other files you want to show/upload.
- No need to panic if anything goes wrong - it can all be corrected if necessary.
Note this process is exactly the same for any PDF document file you may want accessible on the Wiki. You just select a PDF file, instead of an image file and upload that.
Did it upload correctly?
On the top or bottom of the wiki page you will find a link called Special Pages: click on that and it shows a list of links. Select Gallery of new files. You should see your photos and the occasional PDF icon. Go back to the "Special Pages" page and click on Recent changes. You will see that it says you uploaded images.
To include an image in a page, use a link that has this sort of format [[Image:File.jpg]], [[Image:File.png|alt text]] or [[Media:File.pdf]]. Note that filenames are case sensitive and any spaces in a filename are automatically changed to underscores.
Here is a detailed description of positioning images on a page.
Google Maps are a bit more of a challenge. An understanding of the wiki Google maps syntax is generally required.