Help:Contents

Introduction

This page is ***still under construction***. The idea of this page would be to make a easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide on how to use the wiki.
After going through this manual, you should know how to navigate the wiki, change pages and create pages.
The information that you will find here should be the same like you will find in the wiki-workshops.

If you have suggestions on how to improve this manual, please improve or leave notes on the discussion page.
--Ilja (talk) 15:15, 3 December 2016 (CEST)

What is the wiki

The wiki is a tool used by the Belgian Pirates that everyone can contribute to and is considered by many to be our memory. The software on witch it is based, is the software that is used by wikipedia, therefore you will find that much of how this wiki works is the same as how things are on wikipedia. Everyone can search, visit, create, change and follow pages. The three main uses for the wiki are the presentation of information, the use as a workspace and archiving material. In the following we will go further into how you can use the wiki.

How to navigate

Mostly pages will have links on them that you can follow. There are both external links like this, they will take you out of the wiki and internal links like this, they will link to a place inside the wiki. Here and there you can also find links to files. To see the difference, just look at the icons next to the link.
You can also use the navigation-tools available. As you will see, every page on the wiki that is being loaded, is loaded within a certain frame. This frame consists of a left sidebar, a top header and a search box. You can see links on the left sidebar and in the header. If you are looking for something specific you can always use the search-box.

Beyond just navigating

Next to navigating you can also follow, create and change pages. For this You need a user-account. You don't have to be afraid of accidentally doing things wrong or braking things. Every change that is made to a page is automatically being kept in a history. When you accidentally brake or remove something, it is always possible to do a roll-back so that the page is back to what it was.

Creating a user-account

On the top right of the page you will see "create account", click on this. You'll be directed to a new page. The first thing you'll be asked, is to translate a word. This is done to protect against automated account creation. The languages that you can encounter in this little test, are the same languages you'll find on the wiki; namely English, French and Dutch. Next, enter a user-name, password, confirm your password and type your email address. This email address will be used for conformation and password recovery, so make sure it's a working address. If you want, you can also give your real name, but this is only optional. Now click on the 'create your account'-button. You'll be directed to a welcome page and a confirmation email will be send to your email address. Go to your mailbox and open this email, if you do not see the email, check you spam-folder. Click the correct link and you'll be directed to your own user:talk. Congratulations, you are now logged in! If you would ever need to log out or log in again, you can find the links for this on the top-right of your screen.

Your own User talk

Basically, a user talk is just a wiki-page like any other wiki-page. In practice however, this page is used as a place where people can leave you a message. Since we are here now, let's write ourself a message, shall we?
On the upper right you'll see a tab 'edit', click this. Now you can write something, for example type:

Hello fellow pirates!<br>
 --~~~~

On the bottom of the page you'll see a button 'show preview' and 'save page'. Normally you would first click 'show preview', but let us click 'save page'. You will now be redirected to the page you were editing, in this case your user talk. Congratulations you have just edited your first page ;)
You will now see the text 'Hello fellow pirates!' with under it your autograph. So, what have we done here?
You have simply wrote some text, this is now visible. You have also wrote <br>, this is used to tell the wiki-software that you want to start writing on the next line. --~~~~ automatically creates your autograph. You can also put a shorter autograph as just ~~~. When you answer to a comment you can also indent your answer. For example, if you click edit again you can answer by typing:

:hello back ;) Nice to see you here!
:--~~~~

You can indent even more by typing multiple ':'. If you want you can play around with this a bit :)
The autographs are used constantly on talk and discussion pages. You'll find them rarely on the regular pages. If you ever want to get to your User talk, simply click on 'Talk' on the top-right of the page.

Following (watching) a page

There will probably be some pages that you would like to follow. This means that you get an email every time someone changes the page(s) you are following. You are definitely going to want to do this for your user talk. There are different ways to follow a page. When you look at the upper right of your page, you should see a little star. If this star is blue, you are following the page. If it is white, you are not following the page. To change the star from blue to white you simply have to click it. Make sure that the star for your user talk is blue, so that you get notified if someone sends you a message. Another way is, when editing a page, simply check the check-box 'Watch this page' above the 'Save changes'-button. You will also find a check-box 'This is a minor edit', if you check this box, people who follow this page won't be notified. You can use this for example to correct a spelling error and you don't want to bother everyone with this, however you should not make a habit of checking this to much.
If you want a quick overview of the pages you are following, you'll find a link 'Watchlist' on the top-right corner of your screen. Here you will come on a page that gives you an overview of changes made on the different pages you follow. On this page you can also 'View and edit watchlist', 'Edit raw watchlist' and even 'Clear the watchlist'.

Creating your own sandbox and user page

sandbox

On the top-right of the page you'll see 'sandbox'. Every user has this. This is a place where you can try out things before putting it on another page. Click this. You'll be directed to a page where you get the message "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or edit this page." This is because this page does not exists yet. On the top-right, click on 'Create'. You'll see that you can now change the content on the page in the same way like you could for your user talk. Let's type something!
Things that you will often find on a page are titles, subtitles, subsubtitles... You can also find bulletpoints, enumerations and hyperlinks. Let's just use al of these by typing the following:

=section=
This is a section
==subsection==
This is a subsection. You can go even further with subsub...-sections by adding extra '=', try this ^^
#enumerate
##subenumerate
##second subenumerate
#second enumerate
##subenumerate
*bulletpoint
**subbulletpoint
**another subbulletpoint
*another bulletpoint
simple hyperlink: http://pirateparty.be<br>
external link [http://pirateparty.be using words]<br>
internal link [[Main_Page|using words]]<br>
email address link [mailto:someone@somewhere.be using words]<br>
<!-- This is commentary and will not be shown on your page -->

'<!--' and '-->' are tags used to tell the wiki-software that you do not want this on your page. You can use this for commentary, or to create sections or text that you do not want to be shown yet.
Now click on the 'Show Preview'-button to see what this does. Feel free to play around with this a bit to give you a feel of how this all works :) If you want to save this, simply click the 'Save page'-button. In case you did; Congratulations! You have just created your first page ;)

user page

On the top-right of the page you will see your name. Click this. Now you will be directed to your user page. Again, this page does not exist yet, so we will create this by clicking 'Create' on the upper-right.
You can use this page to give information about yourself, who you are, what crew you are in, how people can contact you, what your interests are, what languages you speak...
There is not really a standard for making your user page, just be creative ;) And if you want inspiration, you can, of course, always look at other people's user-pages :p We strongly recommend creating a User page, since this is how people can get to now you better.
On the upper-left you will also see 'Discussion', this will lead you to your User talk.

Creating a crew page

***TODO***
***Needs link to a section on this page on how to upload files and images***

We ask that every crew creates their own wiki-page. You can use this page as a way to tell more about yourself and what it is you are doing or want to be doing as a crew. You can also use this as a workspace by centralising different projects, or use this as an archive where people find information about past events, beers or elections. Even though, as a crew, you are free to use and build this page how you think is best yourself, there are certain conventions that we ask to be followed. The convention for naming a crew-page is Crew_Name_of_the_Crew. We also ask that everyone uses the Crew Sidebar. This is both to have crucial information in one easy-to-find spot, but also so that the wiki-software can easily extract certain information, for example as is used in this page.
For the same reason, you should also add category-labels stating your crew, region and province. As an example we give the tags from Crew_BW (Francophone) and Crew_Brugge (Dutch):

Francophone: 
[[category:Crew BW]]
[[category:Crew en Wallonie]]
[[category:Crew en Province du Brabant Wallon]]

Dutch:
[[category:Crew Brugge]]
[[category:Crew in West-Vlaanderen Provincie‏‎]]
[[category:Crew in Vlaanderen‏‎]]

For more inspiration, you can always look at the pages of other crews. There is also a page with templates where you chose a template to base yourself on. You can also add your own template there if you want. If you would like to add pictures or a banner, you can always look here or here, or upload your own images if you'd like ***Needs link (probably a section on this page) on how to do this***. An example code of inserting an image is

[[File:Belgium.png|800px|left|Banner Belgian Pirates]]

Using and inserting a pirate pad

***TODO***

Creating a squad page

***TODO***

How to archive pages

***TODO***

Extra resources

Next to this manual, we also have a small manual that uses video's that show you what to do here.
What we have shown on this page are the mere basics for navigating the wiki and creating pages. There are much more possibility’s to creating pages than what you have seen here. A good source for extra functionality is simply copying pieces of code from other pages. For example, say you want a link that looks just like the link you saw on another page, well then, just go to that page, click edit, find where the link should be, copy the piece of code used and try it out on the page where you want to use it. You can even try to play around with these pieces of code or tags to see what you can do with them and make it look even better!
Because this wiki uses the same software as the original wikipedia, their help page is also a good source for help. Pages that we think might be interesting on the wikipedia-help are the pages on how to place links on your pages, how to format your text and how to create tables.

Get extra help

For extra help or just to give us input or remarks, you can, of course, always leave a message on the discussion page, which is the wiki-way ;)
You may also contact us by e-mail
Or if you want, you can always leave a message or question in the pad bellow. Be aware however that we do not get automated updates when something gets changed on this pad. Therefore, we would advise not to use this for urgent matters. Although, since we are currently in the process of creating this manual, we will of course be checking in on this pad on a regular basis.
http://www.piratepad.be/p/Wiki-Manual_Discussion