Guide:Wiki Maintenance

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This is intended to be a community-driven wiki, although all STEP wiki contributions have originated from only a handful of STEP site contributors. Our goal is to make it easy for all community members to contribute and help us maintain existing content and develop new content. The first step in doing that is to make our user base more comfortable with the idea of working on a wiki and thinking in wiki terms.

STEP Wiki Rules

• Do not place pages in incorrect categories. If you categorize a user page as a mod page, that is simply wrong.
• Do not edit a user's page unless asked to, except in the case where it is not abiding by another rule (as in, being categorized with the STEP Guides, when it is not one of them).

Wiki Editing

Wikis are by definition:

"a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content."

As such there is no one way to do things correctly, whatever works for each user is acceptable. The important points to remember are:

1. There are a number of different types of wiki markup, or languages. STEP uses the MediaWiki markup.
2. Edits can be done 'on the page' using the site's software or 'offsite' in your favourite editor. You can then copy-paste the content back into the wiki.
3. Any errors are not going to 'break the wiki'. They can simply be fixed in the same manner.

Page Management

How to create, delete, edit and manage a wiki page.

Magic Words

Magic words are special 'text strings' that are used by the wiki software to return values or functions.

A full description of them can be found on the MediaWiki website.

Some are used for links, either to other pages in the current wiki or to outside pages.

{{#switchtablink:Profiles|Profiles}} is a link to a chapter in the current document that also has a 'tabbed' header, such as the Mod Organizer wiki.

YouTube videos can also be linked to with code like this:

{{Video|j4ZQpzf_iAE|Mod Organizer: Introduction (by Gopher)|Gopher Explains Mod Organizer}}

Here the magic word Video is read as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= and j4ZQpzf_iAE, the YouTube address for that specific video, is appended to the YouTube code to provide a valid address. Clicking that link will display a popup window of that video file.

Symbols

Search for HTML symbols and use a code like "#8594;" with an ampersand "&" in front of it to produce "→"

Formatting Basics

This will hold the dos, donts and good habits with formatting but be focus on where to look for the info.
Like the cheatsheet...

Inline HTML and CSS

I believe that is what the span style tag is. This will give some common usages that are on step but will will guide the user to a link for what styles are valid like such

Using Templates

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Using Forms

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Wiki Development

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Creating Templates

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Creating Forms

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References

• Visit the main Mediawiki site. Read through the content and reference it often.
• The STEP Wiki forum