Difference between revisions of "Help:Contents"

Latest revision as of 12:59, 23 November 2010

Welcome to the MegaDrumWiki help section! This page currently contains:

• General formatting documentation to help you get started writing articles;
• Some guidelines on writing new/editing articles for MegaDrumWiki.

Please read the following carefully especially if you haven't worked with MediaWiki based projects before.

If you are looking for help with building/buying/troubleshooting MegaDrum, please refer to the forums for now.

MediaWiki markup

Basic formatting

The most important part of a MediaWiki article is meaningful plain text. However, formatting is required to deliver rich content. Basically, you enter text with special control characters/structures to get formatting effects. For example, to get bold text you would enter the following:

'''This text is bold'''

This will render:

This text is bold

Please refer to the basic formatting documentation. You can also learn the formatting rules from viewing the content of existing MediaWiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia pages).

Linking

Linking to pages is explained in detail here. Here is an example link to the MegaDrum article on MegaDrumWiki (this is an example of linking between MegaDrumWiki pages):

[[MegaDrum]]

This will give the following output:

MegaDrum

Remember that it is bad practice to link every single word because this brings confusion to the reader.

Article sections

Dividing your article into sections is a good idea to separate different important parts of information from each other. To add a new section to the article use this code:

==New section==

And if you need a subsection, type:

===New section subsection===

More information can be obtained here.

If an article contains multiple sections, a table of contents will be automatically shown in the beginning of the page.

Templates

This is one of the most amazing features of MediaWiki. Templates are actually regular MediaWiki pages that can be inserted into other pages. However, parameters can be passed to templates that make them really flexible.

To invoke an existing template you use the code

{{Template_name}}

For example, here is the {{LCD}} template without parameters. The code to invoke it is:

{{LCD}}

This code will render:

And here is an example of the template with parameters:

{{LCD|
color=white|
float=right|
bgcolor=blue|
line1=<CustomCurve1{{nbsp|2}}>|
line2=P1:{{nbsp|11}}2♦|
caption=Custom curve '''CustomCurve1''' point '''P1''' value
}}

Templates usually come with documentation on how to use them. If you are making a new template please take some time to document its features. Do this by adding a doc subpage to your template. More info on this here.

Adding images

This is neatly documented here. Everything else falls under the guidelines part of this page.

Adding videos

Currently there is two ways for doing this. One is invoking the video template, for example:

{{video|
url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7u4USyw0gU|
desc=How to remove the ATmega MCU from its socket}}

This renders:

Watch the video: How to remove the ATMega MCU from its socket

Another way is to insert a video directly into the page using this syntax:

{{#ev:youtube|-7u4USyw0gU|250|right|How to remove the ATmega MCU from its socket}}

The video may appear outside of the parent section. Please note, that {{#ev:...}} is not a template but a special extension.

References

References can be used as footnotes. Here is an example.

Here is some information that has an associated note.<ref group="notes">This is the note.</ref>

This will render: Here is some information that has an associated note.^{[notes 1]}

Notes are usually added to the bottom of the page by using something like

== Notes ==
<references group="notes" />

More about references here.

wikEd

This extension can come in handy for simplifying editing articles. It can be installed for example as a Greasemonkey script in Firefox. Read more about it here.

Guidelines

This section contains some basic guidelines to help you get started writing (editing) articles.

Writing

The main goal of writing wiki articles is to provide the reader with required information. Writing quality material is the second goal. When writing articles periodically check that:

• You maintain a good informative level of expression and provide enough (but not too much) links to pages with explanatory material. In other words, the article should be understandable by both beginners and advanced users;
• Your writing/editing results in a quality article render. You should use the preview button.

If you can, check pages with multiple applied CSS styles in a variety of browsers to determine display errors. If any exist, first post a report to the discussion page. However, if you are completely certain you can easily fix this, please do so.

When to link to a main article?

When the topic in question is important and requires detailed explanation. Invoke the {{Main}} template like so:

== Section title (or subsection, etc.) ==
{{Main|Your_article}}

Linking

When you link to a MegaDrumWiki page using the [[Some_page]] syntax the link will be displayed regardless of the page existence which gives the reader with editing rights the ability to create it. This is useful, however sometimes it is better to use a different type of linking, especially when a similar page exists in Wikipedia or any other wiki. Then there is simply no need to recreate it for MegaDrumWiki.

Here is a concrete example. Suppose we want to let the reader know what DIY stands for. Instead of linking it to a MegaDrumWiki page we can link to Wikipedia using the following syntax:

[[Wikipedia:do-it-yourself|DIY]]

Which gives the following output: DIY

Editing existing pages

Only edit existing quality pages when:

• You know what you are doing;
• You've found a spelling or factual error that you know how to correct;
• You can provide more useful information (i.e. expand an article).

This is important because only registered wiki users are given editing rights. This means that an article will usually have few authors and sudden changes in an article may cause conflicts. So the best thing you can do in case you think that the article is either severly outdated or needs to be rewritten is to go to the article talk page first (accessible by clicking the page discussion tab) and sharing your thoughts with the rest of the users.

Always preview pages first. Also remember to check This is a minor edit checkbox before saving a page when making only a minor edit.

Be especially careful when editing templates. These are used on multiple pages and thus must be handled with care.

Inserting images

It is good practice to insert images with secondary illustrative purpose as thumbnails. The width of those thumbnails should not exceed 250 pixels. This takes into account the variety of display settings used to view the wiki pages and should work for everyone. Also, these thumbnails should be aligned right (this is the default setting).

Inserting videos

When to insert videos as links within a box notification:

• When the content of an article can be replaced by viewing the video
• When the video is accompanied by quality annotations and/or comments

When to embed videos into pages:

• When the videos are used as accompanying material

The same rule applies for embedded videos as for inserting image thumbnails: use max 250 pixel widths and keep the aligned to the right of the page.

Unfinished articles

If you think that the article suffers from too little informative quality you can insert the template {{Stub}} at the top (or bottom) of the page. Please use this sparingly.

Writing translations

The preferred language for this wiki is English. In order to write a translation make a subpage for your language for the main page. E.g. for a Russian translation of the MegaDrum page, make a MegaDrum/ru subpage. After the translation is complete, insert the language bar on the top of the parent and child pages by invoking the {{Languages}} template like so:

{{Languages}}

This will render the language bar:

Language:	English

Conclusion

Keep in mind that these are only general guidelines and that there may be exceptions. Thank you for taking your time reading this. We are looking forward to your contributions.

Notes

1. ↑ This is the note.