Weeniepedia User Guide

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(NOTE: This User Guide, like a lot pages on Weeniepedia, is a work in progress.)

The following is a basic guide for learning to create and edit Weeniepedia pages.

To create or edit an article in Weeniepedia, you need to be a registered member of Weeniecampbell.com with a minimum of 5 posts on the forum. You also need to be logged into Weeniecampbell.com.

Browsers

All browsers tested to date work fine with Weeniepedia's default Skin (called MonoBook). This includes Safari, IE, Firefox and Opera. If you have problems please post to the Weeniepedia Glitches topic on the forum and we will attempt to fix the problem. As an interim workaround you could also try finding the "my preferences" link, choose the "Skin" tab, select "Classic" and Save. You will now have a much friendlier Weeniepedia to work on.

Weeniepedia Content

Weeniepedia content is partly derived from the WeenieCampbell.com forum; content can also been completely new material. We have developed a couple of conventions. For Lyrics or Guitar Keys, we ask that you run them through the appropriate WeenieCampbell.com forum discussion prior to adding them to Weeniepedia. This helps with quality control.

Editing and Creating Pages

The Weeniepedia Edit Box

To begin editing an article, click the Edit tab at the top of the page. Adding text is as basic as typing, but the wiki also uses its own code, called Wikitext, which is a relatively simple markup language to learn. And you only have to know a few basics to get started.

  • The Wiki editor screen, often called an Edit Box, includes BBC (Bulletin Board Code) buttons at the top, very much like the WeenieCampbell Forum's BBC buttons. These buttons provide easy ways to format text (Bold, Italics), create headings (called Headlines), embed Images, and create internal and external Links.
  • The Wiki editor will also accept many html codes (for formatting a variety of things) as well as the Wiki's own set of codes for editing pages. Part of the learning curve for creating a page (or an article in wiki speak) is to learn a basic set of codes in order to understand what a previous editor is doing in a page, or to create a new page of your own. The Wiki's Help system has some good tutorials on Creating Pages, Editing and Advanced Editing.
  • At the bottom of the editor screen, there are a few other important buttons: Save page, Show Preview, and Show Changes. Before you save a page or section that you are editing or creating, it is good practice to use the Show Preview button. This allows you to preview the page and ensure everything is formatted properly and looks good. It also reduces the number of changes listed in the page history. Once you are satisfied with your changes, click Save Page.
  • The Summary field is a place to put a description of the changes you made to the page. For instance, "Added photo of Tampa Red." Or "Edited Discography."
  • The "This is a minor edit" checkbox is for edits no one could possibly care about (adding a missing punctuation mark, correcting a minor typo).

Editing Pages

  • Editing pages - the Weeniepedia Help file on Editing. The main Help page covers all Wiki basics.
  • Editing Help Page at MediaWiki Some editing basics. Note that there may be some differences between Weeniepedia and the standard Mediwiki setup described. For example, we currently do not have the Discussion function enabled, since we have a user forum already.
  • Wikitext examples Some more examples of Wikitext used to edit and format your Weeniepedia articles. This page will show you how to use basic text formatting, HTML tags, Links, Images, Tables and other page formatting techniques.

Quick Editing Tips

  • To add extra line breaks, you can add the html code <BR> to the end of a line. Like so:
Woke up this morning, Weeniepedia on my mind<BR>

The <BR> code can be repeated as needed. <BR><BR> will create two line breaks.

  • To create clickable links to external webpages, add the Wikitext [http://www.example.com link title], where www.example.com is the URL and "link title" is the name of the page. For example, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia], creates this link to Wikipedia. Use the BBC button for External Link to insert code quickly.
  • To create internal Weeniepedia links, add the Wikitext [[Link title]], where "Link title" is the name of the Weeniepedia page you are linking to. Use the BBC button for Internal Link to insert code quickly. Note that Internal Links have doubled square brackets, whereas External Links use single square brackets.

Creating Pages

Creating Lyrics Articles - Complete steps for adding Lyrics to Weeniepedia.

Images

To add an image, click Upload File in the sidebar menu called Toolbox at the left of your screen. Browse to the image file on your computer, and select and upload the file. You can then use the photo on any page you want by using the Wikitext:

[[Image:Photo_Name.jpg]].

You can click the "Embedded Image" button at the top of the editing screen to get the basic Wikitext for images. It will insert this text:

[[Image:Example.jpg]]

Replace Example.jpg with the filename of your photo.

For many of the photos on Weeniepedia, we are placing them on the right side of the page. The Wikitext for this is:

[[Image:Photo_Name.jpg|right]]

Adding the | symbol creates several options in the Wikitext markup language. If the image is fairly large, you can also take a thumbnail-with-caption approach, which you have probably seen on Wikipedia. Wikitext for that is:

[[Image:Photo_Name.jpg|thumb|Caption text]]

There are some other options and arguments for Images that you can peruse here:

Images Help

Weeniepedia Categories

Ideally, each article in Weeniepedia should belong to a Category. Categories allow more cross-referencing and indexing of Weeniepedia content, giving you the most bang for your Weenie buck. Categorizing content is considered an advanced editing process by wiki builders, but we are diving right in anyway.

  • You can view existing Weeniepedia categories by choosing Browse Categories from the Site menu.
  • You can also view existing categories using the Category Tree. Click Category Tree on the Site menu, and enter Top Category for a complete list of categories. You can see all Weeniepedia pages by setting the tree to show all pages. The tree gives you a good view of the organization being used in Weeniepedia and can help you categorize your own articles accordingly.

How to add categories

To add an article to a category, put the following Wikitext at the end of the page you are editing:

[[Category:NAME]]

where NAME is the name of the category you want it to belong to. Any number of category tags may be added to the page - the page will be listed in all of them. Every page should have at least one category tag. If you are adding pages (or articles) similar to those already in Weeniepedia, check to see how the similar page is categorized by opening the edit box. For instance, if you are adding a Lyric, you can check an existing Lyric page to see the name and organization of the categories being used.

If you want to create a new category, please run the category name and idea by Weeniepedia Sysops on the forum. Category names are used as the primary linking method for listing articles in automatically generated indexes and naming conventions are important.

More about categories can be found in the Categories Help section of Weeniepedia.

Technical Articles

Weeniepedia Architecture - An Information Technology perspective.