WikiGuidelines

Wiki Guidelines

Wiki Syntax

Best practices

• Read and respect the MediaWiki syntax manual
• If you want to try a syntax use a Sandbox

Tips

• Get the MediaWiki Cheatsheet
• For French people we recommend the book "Wikipédia : Comprendre et participer" by Sébastien Blondeel (around EUR 5,90)

Creating a page

Best practices

• Don't create a page as an anonymous user.
• Write your content in English
• Use the preview mode before saving a page
• Fill the "resume" field with the correct TAG (cf. tags list) and a correct description of your modification
• Think to use the "Minor" checkbox if necessary

Templates

OOo4Kids wiki proposes a large set of templates. They're suppose to help you to reduce the time to write a page and to keep a good level of consistancy in the design and the organization.

Best practices

• Try to use templates as much as possible.
• If you write regularly for the same portion of wiki code create (or ask to someone) a new template instead of making a copy/paste

Discussions

OOo4Kids is based on MediaWiki. The tools provide a solution for separating the content of the page and the discussion : it's the "discuss" tab.

Best practices

• Used the "discuss" tab for discussion
• Sign your contribution
• Only mark edits of typing errors as minor; as soon as you change anything that changes the meaning of a sentence or add or remove content, an edit is no longer minor (as in the Wikimedia interpretation). Remember that people can prefer to ignore minor changes, thinking that those changes are unimportant.

Signing

Best practices

• To maintain the project history, it is recommended to sign the changelogs
• Else, sign all your modifications in a discussion tab
• It is not a good idea to sign in an article, because it's a community document !

Exception : in the discussions tabs (see the previous item) : sign a question helps a lot, and gives a sense to the discussion ;)

Putting uploaded files in a (useful) category

• New members will find stuff easier if it's properly catalogued. So when you upload an image, please add a category to the image file (click Edit when the upload is complete).

Add your locale to the language bar

When add a new translated page, remember to properly set the template for the page title and for the language.

An example for this page is the follow:

Original page title:

• {{PageTitle|Wiki Guidelines}}

Translated page title:

• {{PageTitle/locale_code|Translated_title}}

Remember, leave unchanged the template Languages!

• {{Languages|WikiGuidelines}}