Difference between revisions of "Help:Contents"

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=== For all users... ===
 
=== For all users... ===
 
* After you login for the first time, you should '''click my preferences''' at the top and at least '''enter your real name and email address.''' Do not be tempted to change your password here; the normal password system has been routed through the university's NetID system so changing your password in EEBedia will have no effect (or at least not a positive effect).
 
* After you login for the first time, you should '''click my preferences''' at the top and at least '''enter your real name and email address.''' Do not be tempted to change your password here; the normal password system has been routed through the university's NetID system so changing your password in EEBedia will have no effect (or at least not a positive effect).
* '''Please do not edit the main page.''' The main page is special because it is the first thing everyone sees when they enter the EEBedia. It would be confusing if it were always changing, so please add your 2 cents elsewhere. The same goes for the navigation bar; yes, it is possible to change it, but please resist the temptation. You are welcome to send me suggestions, however, if you think something should be added or subtracted to the main page.
+
* '''Please do not edit the main page.''' The main page is special because it is the first thing everyone sees when they enter the EEBedia. It would be confusing if it were always changing, so please add your 2 cents elsewhere. The same goes for the navigation bar; yes, it is possible to change it, but please resist the temptation. You are welcome to send me (the [[EEB Webmaster]]) suggestions, however, if you think something should be added or subtracted to the main page.
 
* Visit [[How to add to EEBedia]] (always available under the Help link on the navigation bar to your left) to learn how to get started creating and editing articles.
 
* Visit [[How to add to EEBedia]] (always available under the Help link on the navigation bar to your left) to learn how to get started creating and editing articles.
  

Revision as of 13:38, 28 September 2007

EEBedia uses the same software that runs Wikipedia, so that means it is easy to contribute information. Here are some basic instructions, but a much more in depth tutorial is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents.

Who can add to EEBedia

EEBedia is open to everyone for reading, but only current members of the EEB Department can add content. The specific requirements for authoring content are:

  1. You must have a UConn NetID
  2. You must be on a list of allowed UConn NetIDs

For information about UConn NetIDs (getting one if you are new to UConn, or finding out your NetID and password if you have forgotten it), go to the main UConn NetID web page.

To get added to the list of allowed NetIDs, send your NetID (but not your NetID password!) to the EEB Webmaster.

Info for new users

For all users...

  • After you login for the first time, you should click my preferences at the top and at least enter your real name and email address. Do not be tempted to change your password here; the normal password system has been routed through the university's NetID system so changing your password in EEBedia will have no effect (or at least not a positive effect).
  • Please do not edit the main page. The main page is special because it is the first thing everyone sees when they enter the EEBedia. It would be confusing if it were always changing, so please add your 2 cents elsewhere. The same goes for the navigation bar; yes, it is possible to change it, but please resist the temptation. You are welcome to send me (the EEB Webmaster) suggestions, however, if you think something should be added or subtracted to the main page.
  • Visit How to add to EEBedia (always available under the Help link on the navigation bar to your left) to learn how to get started creating and editing articles.

For graduate students...

If you want your research to show up in the EEB Spotlight area of the main page, create a short intro with a single image and a title like this "Dissertation Research: Your Name". See Dissertation Research: Jon Richmond for an example. By starting your title with "Dissertation Research:", it makes it easy to find all of these research synopses by typing "Dissertation Research" into the search tool.

At the end of this page, put in a "More..." link to a page with a more extensive description of your research, and a few more photos (including one of yourself if possible). See Jon's page for an example (i.e. click on his More... link).

Starting a new page

There are two easy ways to create a brand new page:

  • Type the title of your new page in the search box, then press go. The search will fail, but you will be given the option of creating a new page with that title
  • Edit an existing page, putting in a link to the non-existant new page. When you save the page you edited, the link will show up in red, meaning it does not yet exist. Click the new link and you will be given the option to create the page.

Avoid the temptation to edit the main page (say for the purpose of adding a link to your new page). If your page represents a news item or an upcoming event, you might want to make a link to it on the Current events page. This page can be found by clicking the Current events link on the navigation bar to your left, and its contents are dumped into the Main Page. Just remember to date your entry (formatted like the other news items) and keep your announcement short. You can link to a page with more information, for example by placing wikitext like the following in your advertisement: [[MyPage|More...]], where MyPage is the title of your more extensive page.

Text

Just type text in the window that appears upon clicking the edit tab of any existing page. You can use the toolbar at the top of the window to learn how to italicize or bold words.

Subsections

Creating a new section can be done by surrounding the title with equals signs. Two equals signs flanking a title produces a subheading. For example, the heading of this subsection looks like this: ==Title==. Three equals signs flanking some text produces a subsubsection heading. For example, this subsubsection was created using this syntax: ===Subsections===

Preformatted text

Preformatted text is text that appears exactly as typed, in a fixed-width typewriter font such as Courier. You can create preformatted text by simply placing a space at the beginning of each line. For example,

This line begins with a space and is treated as preformatted text

Centering text

Use an HTML div tag to center text

<div style="text-align: center">text you want to have centered</div>

Changing the font size

Use an HTML span tag to make text larger

 <span style="font-size: larger">To be shown in large font</span>

Line breaks

You may have noticed that pressing the enter key in the editor does not insert a line break, and pressing the enter key twice inserts two line breaks! There are many situations where you would like to insert just one line break (say, to separate the lines in your address). To insert just one line break, use a <br/> HTML tag. Here is an example of what is typed into the editor:

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology<br/>
University of Connecticut<br/>
75 N. Eagleville Road<br/>
Storrs, CT 06269

And here is what it looks like when formatted:

University of Connecticut
75 N. Eagleville Road
Storrs, CT 06269

More information about text formatting

More information about what to include in style attributes can be found at the CSS HowTo

Much more information about organizing and formatting wiki pages is available at the Wikitext site.

Hyperlinks

To add a hyperlink to a page external to EEBedia, just type in the URL (including the initial http://): For example, here is a link to the EEB home page: http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ that is created by simply adding the text http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ to the sentence.

Most of the time, you will not want long URLs to clutter up your page. It is easy to create a short hyperlink by enclosing the URL in square brackets and, after a space, typing in the name you wish to use: For example, here is a link to EEB that is done like this: [http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ EEB].

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link for information about creating more complicated hyperlinks.

Footnotes and citations

To add a footnote or citation to a page, insert the text of the footnote at the spot where you want the footnote symbol to appear, surrounded by a <ref> tag. For example, here is a a reference to a work familiar to biologists[1]. Here is what I inserted at this point in the document:
...work familiar to biologists<ref>Darwin, C. R. 1859. ''Darwin, C. R. 1859. ''On the origin 
of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for
life.'' London: John Murray.</ref>. At this point...
Note that the body of the footnote does not appear here. Instead, it appears at the bottom bottom of this page in a "References cited" section, at a point where I inserted the following tag:
<references/>

This is an example of a very simple use of footnotes/citations. If you want to get more elaborate, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite/Cite.php

Uploading files (e.g. images)

Slime mold at Goodwin Conservation Center
Pediastrum duplex.
You can upload an image file at Special:Upload. Please refrain from uploading an image that is excessively large. If you click the image of Pediastrum duplex at right, you are shown its actual size, which is about 60 KB. This is a reasonable size. The image of slime mold fruiting bodies at left is about as large as an image on EEBedia should be (150 KB). Images larger than this must be reduced in size to fit on a typical computer screen, so such files take up no more space on the server than is needed.

Below is the wiki text that was used to create the two images shown here. Note that including the keyword thumb causes the photo to be shown as a thumbnail (reduced size) image. The larger image can be obtained by clicking on the thumbnail. You can use the keywords left, right, or center to position the image horizontally on the page. Finally, the last entry in the image tag is the caption text. See the extended image syntax page for more information about inserting images in to wiki pages.
[[Image:Pediastrum_duplex.jpg|thumb|right|''Pediastrum duplex'']]
[[Image:Slime_mold_2777.jpg|thumb|left|Slime mold at Goodwin Conservation Center]]

Linking to PDF files

To create a little PDF icon that links to an actual pdf file somewhere on the internet, you can do this:

{{pdf|http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/test.pdf}} A test PDF file. 

The double-squiggly brackets are essential, as is the word pdf followed by the vertical bar. The rest of the template should be filled with an actual URL starting with http:// and ending with the name of the pdf document. Here is how it will look in your EEBedia page:

Pdficon small.gif A test PDF file.

Templates

Templates are small articles that can be embedded within other articles. To see an example of a template, click this link. This template can be inserted in an article using the following syntax:

{{Under Construction}}

Here is what the template looks like when it is embedded:

Under construction.png This article is still under construction.
Expect it to change frequently until this notice is removed.

To create a template, create a page in which the title begins with prefix Template:. The part following the colon becomes the label used when embedding the template in a page. The "Under Construction" template referenced above was created by creating an article entitled

 Template:Under Construction

Categories

You can assign your article to a category named "EEB courses" by placing something like this at the bottom

[[Category:EEB Courses]]

This would create the category if it does not yet exist. This will place a link to the category at the bottom of your article that enables users to find other articles in the category. You can get a listing of all existing categories by clicking on the "Special pages" link in the toolbox at left.

Tweaks

__NOEDITSECTION__

Putting this command anywhere in an article inhibits [edit] links from appearing on the righthand side of each section of your article. (Note that there are two leading and two trailing underscores in the name of the command.)

References cited

  1. Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray.