Help:Contents

This page offers some basic help to wiki users.

General
If you want to take part on the ITSLM wiki (taking part in discussions, asking questions, or editing content) you will need to register for a wiki user account.

Asking questions about content
If you want to ask the community about the content of a particular page, select the page's Discussion tab and (assuming you're a registered user) you will be able to add your question to the page.

You should always sign your Discussion entries using ~, this will put in your username and a timestamp so people know who asked the question and when.

This is my very insightful question to the users. ~

Renders (for me, at least) as:

This is my very insightful question to the users. MBools 11:34, 29 January 2012 (GMT)

Asking another user a direct question
To address another wiki user directly, you can use their talk page. A user's talk page can be accessed via their profile; go the user's profile page and select the Discussion tab; alternatively, go to the user's talk page directly User_talk: (replacing  with their username, so my talk page is User_talk:Mbools).

Commenting on, and discussing, content
Discussion of a pages content should take place on its talk page (accessed via the Discussion tab at the top of the page). Use the same approach as asking a question (above).

Don't carry on discussions on the main pages themselves! The main page may make reference to any discussion or dispute taking place within the community (including the page's own talk page). The summary of any dispute can be put in a section title 'Dispute' or 'Objections' or something similarly descriptive. I can't stress enough though that these sections are not the place to hold the conversation, they should just summarise the nature of the conversation and, if appropriate, reference the primary source for the dispute.

Help with editing pages
First, you need to be a registered user to edit or add content.

Once you've registered, pretty much any page can be edited (some pages will be restricted but we try to leave most content freely editable).

To edit a page (or section on a page) click one of the edit links you will see on the page. The Edit tab at the top of each page allows you to edit the page as a whole, while individual sections can be edited using the edit link next to the section title.

Basic formatting
Wiki markup can become quite complex, however, basic editing is very straightforward and generally no more difficult than editing text. This page provides a cheat sheet for the basic markup instruction (making things bold, underlined, italic, and creating links, that sort of thing). These instructions will apply to any MediaWiki based site.

In addition to these basic markup rules, MediaWiki allows macros to be used. You will see macros like this scattered throughout the text. Don't panic. These macros are (usually) self explanatory and the easiest way to learn how to use them is to look at a page the already uses them and copy its source.

More advanced stuff
Once you've mastered the basics of editing text you're ready to move on to the more advances features of this wiki. Bad news for you is that mastering these does require a bit of a learning curve. Good news is that, generally, once you've learned the core ideas you'll be able to create some pretty cool pages with ease.

Here are some more advanced pages when you are ready.


 * Categorising your page.
 * Making citations.
 * Adding footnotes and in page references.
 * Common ITSLM custom macros.
 * Adding knowledge using Semantic Web properties.
 * Using Semantic Web queries to construct page content.