Wiki instructions

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A wiki is an interface which allows users to input content - which is then updated without having to write any code or without having to submit html files.

The Open Source Ecology wiki is powered by MediaWiki. Please refer to the MediaWiki help pages for complete and up-to-date technical information about using this wiki.

Basic Concepts

This is the critical point about a wiki: you can start new pages, and use a wiki as a general repository for a large amount of information, which can be organized as a subsequent step. So: internalize this point and start using wikis as a place where human knowledge can be collected, and value can be added to that knowledge by further organization towards applications.

Categories

Categories can be used to organize a large number of pages, media, and even other categories. Read Using Categories for more information.

Content

There is a wide scope of things that can be included on the wiki - anything related to healthy, sustainable living, open source technology, good human relations, human empowerment, etc. OSE is about the integration of humans with technology in a benign way, and with a focus on open source techniques. That's just about all under the sun that was historically proven to be benign. Please be careful to keep this in mind in terms of editing.

The wiki in general is supposed to be a 'braindump' - so if it is not well-organized initially, it has a chance to become organized at a later date. Short entries, or stubs, are ok because they can be used as a definition later - even if nothing links at present. For example, a person may be well-surprised in the future to find that when a wiki word is created, it is already defined.

Style Guidelines

• The first sentence of an article should be a one-sentence summary of the whole topic
  • The next paragraph should be a longer summary of it
  • Then go into details
• Be direct and practical
  • Avoid acronyms, jargon and neologisms.
  • Never use a long word or phrase where a short one will do.
  • If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
  • Never use the passive where you can use the active (e.g. say "We built the house on Tuesday" rather than "The construction of the house took place on Tuesday".)
  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
• When writing about measurements, list both imperial and metric values. List both Fahrenheit and Celsius for temperatures.

Searching

You can search for contents by typing your search terms on one of the search boxes at the top left corner

• The first search box will search for text matches on this wiki only
• The second search box will perform a custom Google search on this wiki, on our blog, on our discussion forum and other related sites
  • For more details, see the page about the OSE custom search engine

Logging In

Log in first! Before creating new pages or editing existing ones, you have to log in first.

Any person contributing to the project in a substantial way should fill out the Team Culturing survey, and therefore, any name should be linkable with a full description of the person, such as Marcin Jakubowski. This will facilitate referencing and connection between projects and developers. The potential contributions of a person should be transparent if they fill out their abilities in the Team Culturing Survey.

Preferred Method

• Click on Login with OpenID at the upper right corner of the page to log in
  • Just follow the instructions on the page that loads
  • If you see nyud.net appended to our domain address, see the section on Coral CDN below
• If you are logging in for the first time, you'll receive a confirmation email
  • Once you follow the instructions on that email, you'll be able to make changes to our wiki

Without OpenID

• If you already have a wiki account, you can log in without OpenID
• If you want to create an account without using OpenID, contact us to request an account (please provide desired login in the subject line)

Login Problems

• In case you have problems logging in, please contact us to report your problem.

Coral CDN

• If you are accessing our site through Coral CDN (http://openfarmtech.org.nyud.net/wiki/), the login link above won't work.
  • In that case, you have to access the OpenID login page from its original URL or the standard login page.
• If you want to bypass Coral CDN for a given page, append coral-no-serve to the query string, like this:
  • http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Wiki_instructions?coral-no-serve

Creating New Pages

To start a new page, just type the new page name in the search box at the top left corner (the one above the OSE custom search engine box) and click on the button labeled Go. If a similar page already exists, you might want to edit that page instead of creating a new one. Otherwise, click on the message Create the page "your page name" on this wiki! (at the top of the search results) to create the new page.

Then you can start editing the new page. Also, while editing a page, you can create links to new or existing pages with double brackets around their title, for example:

[[My New Additions]]

Creating Subpages

If you want to create a subpage, a page belonging to some topic or main page, then open the URL "wiki/Main_Page/My_SubPage", click on the tab create, edit the page and save it. Please read more about subpages on mediawiki.org

Deleting Pages

Before Deleting a Page

• Think carefully before deleting a page. A redirect is often more appropriate.
• You're urged to read Deleting a page and Sysop: deleting and undeleting before you delete a page.

When to Delete

A page is a good candidate for deletion if:

• it contains spam or complete nonsense
• it's a redirect page whose title has nothing to do with the page it redirects to
  • Example: a page named How to cook using only sunlight that redirects to Arduino controller schematics doesn't make sense. Either redirect it to a page that deals with the subject of cooking using only sunlight, or delete it.

How to Delete

Only Sysops can delete pages. If you're not a Sysop, you should add the following text at the top of the page you would like to delete:

{{delete}}

This will include the delete template and will add that page to a list of candidates for speedy deletion.

Redirecting

You can redirect a page to another page by replacing the contents of the original page with a #REDIRECT, like this:

#REDIRECT [[My destination article]]

You can redirect a page to an interwiki link too:

#REDIRECT [[Appropedia: Justa stove]]

Adding a category may help others find the page, since it'll be listed on the corresponding category page:

#REDIRECT [[Appropedia: Justa stove]]
[[Category: Cooking]]

Too many redirect pages? If you're afraid that the wiki will get cluttered with redirected pages, fear not. You can see this as a feature (a good one), not a bug, since anytime someone tries to add a page with title X (X being one of those redirected pages), they would be redirected to the appropriately-named page, instead of being given the chance to create a page with different title but similar content.

Editing Pages

Tips Before editing a page, click the discussion tab at the top to check what others are saying about that page You can add your own considerations or questions there too To edit existing pages, just click the edit tab Before saving your changes, click the Show preview button located just below the editing window to make sure everything is as expected To save your work, click the Save page button

While in edit mode, there are some buttons at the top of the editing window to help with formatting text, creating links, inserting objects, etc.

Text color

Put in the name of the color in this markup:

<span style="color: green">Some text</span>

The example above generates this:

Some text

Inserting Images

Uploaded Images

To insert an image, anywhere in the body of a page, type:

[[Image:filename.jpg]]

Then click Save page. After the page is saved, you'll be allowed to click on that filename, and the wiki will prompt you for an image file to upload.

External Images

You can simply paste links to images from any of the sites defined on MediaWiki: External image whitelist. See also: $wgEnableImageWhitelist

Example: http://openfarmtech.org/temp-gvcs-icons/3d-printer.png gives this image:

http://openfarmtech.org/temp-gvcs-icons/3d-printer.png

Inserting Image Galleries

Use the gallery tag. Example code:

<gallery>
Image:fefrepstrap1.jpg
Image:fefrepstrap2.jpg
Image:fefrepstrap3.jpg
Image:fefrepstrap4.jpg
Image:fefrepstrap5.jpg
</gallery>

Produces this:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Inserting Movies

To insert movies, see this example:

<html>
<embed src="http://blip.tv/play/nQaynDuJ6BU" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
  width="640" height="510" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> 
</html>

The code above generates this:

For any video, insert the <html> and </html> tags, and put in the html code that you get from YouTube or some other video format.

Inserting Tables

You can copy and paste your data from your spreadsheet to http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php and it will convert it to a cut and pasteable mediawiki table.

Embedding from Blip.tv

Here is a sample embed settings screen from blip.tv. Note that you do 'share', 'legacy player', then click 'go.' Then, make sure you select 'in-line player', flv for flash video - and then click 'update embed code above'. Then, copy the code into the blog, and in the blog, make sure you are in HTML, not visual, mode.

Subtitling Videos

Here's how to activate Universal Subtitles for your videos:

1- Go to http://universalsubtitles.org/ and click on "Subtitle a video" 2- Paste the URL of the video you want to have subtitled. The URL can point to a file in Ogg, WebM or FLV format, or it can point to a video hosted on YouTube or Blip.TV (Vimeo support will be available soon). Examples of URL:

WebM file: http://content.bitsontherun.com/videos/m3P14laP-283112.webm YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shqrdCBTD70 Blip.TV video: http://blip.tv/file/3841170/

3- A black page with a central video and a close button (a red tab on the top right corner) will appear. This is the initial step where users can start typing the subtitles for the video. Since you probably don't want to create the subtitle text right away, but instead want the embed code to paste on your blog, you can just click on the close button.

4- In the next screen, the embed code can be found inside the text box below "Embed this video in your site". Just click on the 'Copy to clipboard' icon next to it. The embed code will look like this:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.www.universalsubtitles.org/embed.js">

    (

      {"video_url": "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shqrdCBTD70"}

    )

    </script>

This embed widget is in alpha stage, so it may have some bugs. I have tested it with youtube videos and it worked quite well. With Blip.TV, the video wouldn't play though.

It'll be really great when it's working correctly with Vimeo and Blip.TV

Policies

The wiki is a place where a large number of people can contribute to content generation and organization. In the ideal situation - a large messy hairball of input is organized into distilled, high quality content. An intricate process is required for this to happen, and it is the goal of this wiki policy to bring this about. A successfully-implemented wiki has the capacity to create order out of chaos - a capacity to self-organize under the guidance of clear procedures in the hands of wiki moderators. For the OSE Wiki, please read the Crash Course to understand the underlying intentions.

Please make sure to familiarize yourself with the following policies:

• Wiki Login Policy
• Wiki Transparency Policy
• Wiki Curators

See also

• Wiki maintenance
• Wiki Reorganization 2011