Newbie
From GrinnellWiki
You can also check out some well-formatted articles and just click the "edit" tab and see how they do it (i.e. SGA, Voicebox, GrinnellPlans). Formatting generally involves a lot of [brackets]. It's a smidgen more complicated than Plans, but becomes intuitive just as easily.
Contents |
Creation and Moderating
- To create an Article, just search for the name of the article you want to make. If it doesn't exist in search results, just press the "create this page" button. Check out the "Recent changes" button on the left navigation bar to see who is creating or editing what as of late.
Please be sure to check the GrinnellWiki policy page. Pages that violate policy will probably be ruthlessly edited.
Content
For help on how to get started formulating your article, check out these (certainly not comprehensive) examples of:
- A Person: Wedge Antilles, Herbie Hancock
- A Place: Joe Rosenfield '25 Center, The Phoenix Café
- An Organization: Debating Union, Board Game Club
As far as moderating content, that's the community's job. This wiki is an expression of self-governance; the Grinnell community at large will decide what should stay and what should go. For contentious issues, use the "discussion" tab at the top of every article to write your reasoning. Besides, everything you write has your name attached to it, so if you want to abuse the wiki we can just ban you. Enjoy!
Organization
Categories
- Always put a category at the bottom of your page for the sake of organization. For the article on Russell K. Osgood, one of his categories is "Presidents." When you click on that category, you'll be able to see other articles about Presidents. To add a category, write
[[Category: YourCategoryHere]]
The page's categories will always appear at the bottom, regardless of where you put it in the editing window. For instance, this page's category is "Administration." Pages can have multiple categories; i.e. Burling's categories are "Buildings," "Academic Buildings," and "Libraries."
Table of Contents and Headings
- Luckily, if you make more than 3 headings of any kind, GrinnellWiki will automatically generate a nice and neat table of contents for you, like you see at the top of this page.
- You can create headings using the "Level 2 Headline" button (Looks like a big "A"). To make subheadings, you just add another equal sign to each side of the text. For example:
== This is a big heading ==
and
=== This is a subheading for that big heading ===
Redirecting
Redirecting is useful for making alternative names for something still point to the original article (i.e. searching for "JRC" will still take you to the Joe Rosenfield '25 Center without having to type it's whole name. Be sure to do this for anything with acronyms or shortened names, like SGA redirecting to Student Government Association or ftp redirecting to Free the Planet!. To do this, after you create your dummy page, enter the following direction as follows:
#REDIRECT [[Intended Article Here]]
You'll also want to do this for abbreviations or misspellings, so that people are more easily able to find the article you're writing. That's why RKO will redirect you to Russell K. Osgood or Lyle's redirects to Lyle's Pub.
Linking
- To link to other GrinnellWiki pages, simply put the name of the article you want to link to inside double brackets. For instance, you could say
"Man, I love [[SGA]]."
You can also link to specific parts of pages by writing[[SGA#Student Programming Committee|Student Programming Committee]]
with the text you want to appear linked after the "|," which then appears as "Man, I really love SGA's Student Programming Committee."
Advanced Linking
- If you're into fancy links and/or deception, you can make a link's text differ from the page that it links to. Thus, writing
"I really love [[board game club|beer and hotdog club]]"
and, with the text before the "|" being the actual link and the text after the "|" being the text you want the linked text to appear as, you might fool some people into attending such an ardently masculine club. This is actually really useful if you want to make reference to Rusty K or a particular Grinnellian cat without explicitly referencing cats at Grinnell as a whole.
- For external links, it's so simple it's confusing. To make a link embedded in text, like "All Hail our Google Overlords," you would simply write
"All Hail our [http://www.google.com Google] Overlords,"
Leaving a space between the URL and the text you're embedding the link in makes it as such.
Pictures
Uploading
- Pictures are fun. To include a picture in a GrinnellWiki article, it must first be uploaded to this website. On the left side the page you'll see a "toolbox" with an "Upload file" link, from where you can view a list of uploaded files. Try to keep your photos around 800x600 for space's sake.
Puttin' 'em in
- The most important thing to remember with putting images in your articles is to make sure they're thumbnails (smaller versions) of the original image so that we aren't overloading our visitors with gigantic, unwanted pictures of lolcats. Once you've uploaded the image, its formatting is pretty easy:
[[Image:graffiti1.jpg|thumb]]
To specifically left-, right-, or center-justify your photo, you can add another "|" to provide further instructions, like so:
[[Image:graffiti1.jpg|thumb|left]]
Finally, to add an embedded comment to the frame of the picture, you add one more "|" and write your comment before the second double-bracket. The exact formatting of the above picture looks like this:
[[Image:graffiti1.jpg|thumb|left|Burling bathroom graffiti makes for a good teaching tool.]]
You'll of course be able to click on any picture to go see its full-sized version.
