GetMeta:Help
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Help!
GetWiki is a wiki and application, a general discussion forum, and a "metawiki" for philosophical and technical issues. Some contributors will have experiences from other wikis, and some will not. Here are a few helpful links, and a few questions are answered below.
Editing FAQ
how do I edit an article?
With GetWiki, it's quite simple, but keep copyrights in mind! Click "edit this page" on the bottom or the side of the page, and type away in the "edit box". You can use the quick buttons at the top of the editable textarea to make bold, italics, image links, and many other common tasks.
how do I make links?
A link is just the name of the page surrounded by double square brackets. It's also possible to make the link display text that is different to the link:
[[page name]] [[page name]]s (suffix displays with link) [[page name|this]] (hide name, display "this") [[page name (Foo)|]] (pipe trick, hides "(Foo)")
- more detail: GetWiki:Custom Links
how do I rename an article?
Only Syops can move (rename) a page. They click on the "move this page" link. When you move a page, please click the "what links here" and fix all links in other articles linking the old page.
how do I edit redirects?
The easiest way to edit the redirected page is to click on the link you see at the top of the page after being redirected: "redirected from ..." Then you can edit the redirect page, and make sure that no text appears before the redirect command:
#REDIRECT [[New Page Name]]
how can I see/compare changes?
GetWiki can produce a list of all the changes (called "diffs" in the WikiSphere) between two given versions of an article (either between two consecutive versions, or between an old and the current version), and these are laid out with changes highlighted side-by-side. These diffs are easy to find from "recent changes" and the "page history" for each article.
how do I use special characters?
Edit the article as normal, and make use of the special characters at the top of the edit box. Older browsers will have trouble with these characters, though.
how do I use images?
First, you need the right to publish the picture under the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that either you created the picture and therefore own the copyright, or it is in the public domain. If the picture is located on a server you control, you can refer to that image from your wiki page by simply including its URL, like this:
http://my.webserver.com/image.png
...and it will be included. If instead you want to upload a picture, you can use Wiki:Upload and once uploaded, you can refer to your image using the details given, for example:
[[Image:Test.jpg|Caption]]
[[Image:Test.jpg|thumb|right|scale:50|Caption [[Link]]]]
- more detail: GetWiki:Custom Images
how do I describe images?
Click on the image to get the description page. Also, when you upload the file everything you put in the upload summary is placed into the image's description page. The image page is just like other articles, so you can edit from there.
how can I delete uploads ?
You cannot, but you can upload a new item with the same name, thereby replacing the old one. You must have sysop status to delete an uploaded file or article.
The GO Button
The GO button appears on all GetWiki pages, next to the SEARCH button at the top and bottom of each page (but just the bottom in "Nostalgia", where the top has a Special Pages GO dropdown feature). The function of the GO button is to display an article directly, or lead you to create a new one, instead of first having to select it from the search result page or create a link manually. In other words, it allows you to quickly navigate from page to page, or create pages, without having to follow links or manipulate your browser's address bar. To view a page, just enter the title and click "GO".
Finding Pages
The GO feature:
- Tries to view the page exactly as it is entered, e.g. "Main Page", or "Main page".
- Tries all lower case (with the first letter capitalized), e.g. if you type "MAIN PAGE", the exact case match would fail, and "Main page" would be displayed.
- Tries the capitalized version, e.g. "first last" becomes "First Last".
- Tries the all upper case version, e.g. "php" becomes "PHP".
- Tries a case insensitive title search that also matches partial page titles, e.g. "Last" would match "First Last". If there are several matches, priority is as follows: a) articles, b) article talk pages, c) user pages, d) user talk pages, e) [default import] pages, f) [default import] talk pages, g) image pages, h) image talk pages. So, if both a talk page with this title and a normal page exist, the normal page is viewed.
- Stopwords are ignored in this title search.
- Prefixes like "User:" and "GetWiki:" are treated as namespaces in the GO feature, so you can "GO" to Talk:Main Page.
- If you want to try a full text search, use the SEARCH button instead.
- When all this fails, it takes you to the "edit this page" function of the title you entered. This allows you to see pages which already exist with the same title you want to create, so you can quickly change your title.
Simplicity
The GO button will allow you to quickly jump to an article, or skip you to the edit function of a new article when that article doesn't yet exist on Wikinfo. The edit page you see is the same, as if you clicked on "edit this page", and will import text from the exporter, Wikinfo, if available.
SEARCH Feature
Full Google-style searching is available in GetWiki. Here are hints about the search possibilities, utilized with the SEARCH button on every GetWiki page. You can also use the Wiki:Index and a full list of Wiki:Pages.
Avoid Short/Common Words
This is the most likely cause of a failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results, to avoid stress on the database. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all articles, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search with longer or uncommon words.
Case-Insensitive
The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.
Boolean Searches
You can use the words "and", "or" and "not" and parentheses in order to formulate more complicated requests. If none of those words is specified, "and" is used by default. For instance, "indian not american" will return all pages that contain the word "indian" but not the word "american". The search "(Immanuel or Immanual) and Kant" will return all pages which contain "Kant" and either "Immanuel" or "Immanual".
No Wildcards
You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for articles with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".
Special Characters
In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this "ë" is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for "Odilienberg" (or "Odiliënberg"); in the second case it can only be found by searching for "Odili, euml and/or nberg".
Words in Single Quotes
If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in articles, for which this problem does not arise. An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe "s" is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the "s".
Namespaces and your Settings
Searches apply to the namespaces checked in your Wiki:Preferences, but can be changed on the search results page to refine or widen your searches.
Excluding Redirects
Check or uncheck the tickbox "list redirects" in "search namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.
WikiText is Searched
The source text (what one sees in the edit box) is searched, rather than the XHTML output. This distinction is relevant for piped links and special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.
Search Indexing Delayed
For reasons of efficiency and priority of the database, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
User Preferences
The user preferences page allows you to personalize some aspects of the site to suit your style of editing. They will apply only when you are logged in. Otherwise all settings are the defaults, such as the "Wikistandard" skin, and so forth. To log in, go to Wiki:Login and put in your username and supply your username/password. You can also create a new account there, if your IP or range has not been blocked.
Left Column
Nickname and Email
- Your Nickname: You may optionally specify a nickname that is different from your username when you enter your signature with
~~~or~~~~. - Your email: You may optionally register your email address (it will not be shown publicly on the site). This will enable you to reset your password by clicking the "Mail me a new password" box on the Wiki:Login screen, if you forget it. Additionally, it will enable other registered users to send e-mail to you from the "email this user" link on your user page, unless you've checked the disable box (see below).
- Disable email from other users: If you check this box, users will not be able to send you e-mail by way of the "email this user" feature. Either way, your email address is never given out. GetWiki sends the message to your address from this site, and you have the option to respond to the sender or not.
Skin (Visual Style)
A skin is a style of page display. Try them out - they are cosmetic versions of the site done using different CSS stylesheets. The classic look is "Classic", while "Minimal" is a simple, bold look. "Moderna" is evolving from its Classic roots as a more agressive design. Skin settings do not override any other settings.
Editbox and Page Settings
- Textbox Dimensions. Here you can set up your preferred dimensions for the textbox used for editing page text, which will differ by browser and your font settings.
- Wiki Functions Settings: You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on Wiki:Changes, Wiki:Watch, and other function pages.
- Threshold for stub display: You may set the number of characters (e.g. 500, 1000, etc.), so that links to an article below your threshold will be displayed in a different color. This helps to identify stub articles, which is personal choice, as Wikinfo does not have a policy against stub articles. If you set the threshold to "0", you will not see "stub" links.
- Hits to show per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.
- Lines to show per hit is somewhat cryptic; specifying a number n means: "do not show any context if the search term occurs beyond line n in the article"; here a paragraph, as well as the blank line between two paragrahs, each count as one "line"; line breaks in the source, even when not affecting the lay-out of the article (and even when not directly visible in the edit box of the article), affect the line count. Setting the parameter to 5000 or more gives context for every occurrence.
- Characters of context per line: the number of characters of context per occurrence; however, the context is anyway restricted to the "line" (see above) it occurs in. To get the whole line, put a large number like 5000.
Default Namespaces
This section allows you to select the namespaces, or article categories, in which your searches automatically look. You can also change this while searching.
Right Column
QuickBar Placement
This is the list of links to the various Wiki:Functions, Announcements, "edit this page", and so on. You may have this "quickbar" appear at the right or left side of each page, or you can have it disappear altogether, but some of the links will be harder to find. Note, there is no option to have it appear at the top or bottom of the page, and some links are not available without showing the quickbar, such as moving (renaming) a page.
Interactive Features
- Show hoverbox over wiki links. On some browsers, putting the mouse pointer over a hyperlink can display the name of the link. This option's setting seems to have little or no control over this feature, at least with some browsers.
- Underline links. Normally, link text will be underlined. Optionally, you may request that links not be underlined, although your browser may not respect this setting. Normally links that are not underlined can still be recognized by color. However, one can then not distinguish between two consecutive words being a single link or two links, without pointing at the words with the cursor.
- Format imported/new links. You can choose to have links to imported and new articles look like this, or like this?. The spelled out option is enabled by default, and links to imported articles and those which do not yet exist will appear in green.
- Justify paragraphs. You may choose to have paragraphs displayed with full justification. This will give a cleaner look to the page, but list items will not be justified, due to stretching.
- Hide minor edits in recent changes. Registered users may choose to mark edits as being minor (meaning fixes too trivial for trusting users to check up on). It applies to Wiki:Changes and the page histories.
- Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers). Group recent changes per day by article, display the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change.
- Auto-number headings. This adds hierarchical outline-style numbering to headers in articles.
- Edit pages on double click. If this box is checked, you can simply double-click on a page to edit it. This option requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser.
- Enable section editing via edit links. This will show small [edit] links allowing individual section editing, for long pages.
- Enable section editing via right click on section titles. This option allows section editing for longer pages, and requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser.
- Show table of contents. This option shows, or hides, the table of contents boxes on pages with 3 or more section headings. The boxes float to the right of the first section. This also requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser.
- Remember password across sessions.
- Edit box has full width. If this box is checked, the edit box (when you click "Edit this page") will be the width of the browser window, minus the quickbar width. You may need to customize the rows and columns settings to suit your browser and tastes.
- Add articles to Watchlist. If this option is selected, any articles that you create or modify will be automatically added to your watchlist.
- Mark all edits minor by default. This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages.
- Show preview before edit box and not after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the exit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page.
- Disable page caching. This turns off page caching. This is useful if you're experiencing problems of seeing outdated versions of pages, but this comes at a cost of longer loading times.
Time Zone Settings
- Your hours of difference from GMT/UTC. This is the number of hours to be added or subtracted from UTC, the world standard time, to find your time zone, if you want it to be used. The time zone is used when calculating displayed page update timestamps, and may become temporarily incorrect from time to time if you observe daylight saving time -- don't forget to update it to match your local time, because the Wiki doesn't know where you are or precisely when you celebrate DST (the server clock may be slightly offset). Below are a few random time zone selections.
- -8 (DST -7) Pacific, Los Angeles
- -7 (DST -6) Mountain, Denver
- -6 (DST -5) Central, Chicago, Mexico City
- -5 (DST -4) Eastern, New York, Atlanta
- 0 (DST 1) GMT, London
- 1 (DST 2) Western Europe
- 2 (DST 3) Eastern Europe
- 3 Eurasia, Moscow
- 9 Japan
- 10 Melbourne
- 12 Pago Pago
- -9 Juneau
- -10 (DST -9) Hawaii
Password
To change your password, enter your old password, the new password, and the new password a second time. (this is NOT needed to change other preferences)
Help! Notes
- You cannot change your username. If for some reason you feel unbearably compelled to change it, contact Proteus to arrange to have it changed.
- Your user page, in the "User:" namespace, is available for your own use, and you can put anything you want to say about yourself on it.
Some content adapted from the Wikinfo article "Wikinfo:Help" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
