Help:Contents-SP
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This page provides a developing, annotated overview of help resources useful for working on StudyPlace. Other, more specific help resources include:
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Help |
- Newcomers — to introduce how to use key features of StudyPlace.
- Policy Guide — to explain key policies and guidelines for the use of StudyPlace.
- Editing — to explain general editing policies and guidelines on StudyPlace
- New Articles — to suggest helpful guidelines for starting new articles on StudyPlace
- Article Context — provides an overview of the context article template
- Posting an Essay — to guide one towards the posting of an essay
- Conversing — to overview conversing guidelines and policies
- Explaining — to introduce explaining guidelines and policies
- Coursework — to introduce users to the coursework possibilities on StudyPlace
- Problem reports — to gather information about system difficulties users may encounter so we can fix them.
Contents |
[edit] Wikipedia & MediaWiki Help
Since StudyPlace runs on the same Platform as Wikipedia, the help system for Wikipedia gives good help here. How much use you want to make of it depends on how much expertise you feel you need. It is best to let your attempted actions drive that determination, knowing that a good explanation about just about anything you might want to do will be relatively close at hand. If you use a browser that supports tabs, it is often best to go to the Wikipedia help system in a separate tab so that you do not loose track of the matter that sent you off in search of help.
MediWiki,[1] the open-source software platform developed to run Wikipedia also has an extensive help system, which is particularly useful for well-synthesized overviews for key purposes of generic users -- a reader, an editor, a moderator, or a sysop. See especially the following —
- Help pages for readers.
- Help pages for editors.
- Help pages for moderators.
- Help pages for system administrators.
The MediaWiki resources are relatively new and now reasonably complete. Check the StudyPlace version page to see what version of MediaWiki we are currently running -- some affordances covered in the MediaWiki help materials will be for versions more recent than the one StudyPlace is using, but the heop materials generally indicates when a function runs only on recent versions.
Wikipedia help resources are often more granular and less tidy, although comprehensive contents pages and tables are useful for navigating to what you want and are kept up-to-date.
- For access to the most important parts of the Wikipedia help system.
- For a fuller exploration, Wikipedia how-to is useful, as is the Wikipedia help FAQ, and for even fuller access, consult Wikipedia's list of shortcuts. Explore this list of abbreviated page titles as a means of finding most of its many guides and help resources.
- If you are interested in how MediaWiki works, you will find excellent help resources on its site.
[edit] Help on editing & developing articles
See Help:New articles for StudyPlace guidelines on starting new articles. These concern an important way in which the process of peer production on StudyPlace differs from the process on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has extensive help resources, which are valid for work on StudyPlace because it uses the software platform developed for Wikipedia. Here are a few key leads, which will take you to many more.
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Tip: Often it's helpful to open two instances of StudyPlace, one for help and another for editing. That is easy with current browsers — hit Ctrl-t — or with an older one, just open it twice. |
- Editing, elementary: The Wikipedia cheatsheet will get you started.
- Editing, intermediate: The Wikipedia editing tutorial introduces editing fully and for experienced editors is useful in jogging the memory about how to achieve one or another result.
- Editing, advanced: This entry gives a full discussion of editing on Wikipedia.
- For help on links. . . . A peer-produced digital commons thrives on links; they give it life.
- For help on images and media. . . .
- The Wikipedia manual of style defines on many questions of presentation and copy-editing. Let us follow it on StudyPlace.
- The Wikipedia guide to layout is very helpful in constructing articles.
- Although the Wikipedia guide to writing better articles is most pertinent to work on Wiki-ed, it has advice that will prove useful throughout StudyPlace.
- Wikipedia article development
[edit] Policies and guidelines
Over its short history, Wikipedia has set and evolved a wide range of policies and guidelines, which are crucial for its success. Anyone seriously engaged in efforts at peer production in a digital commons should become conversant with these. On StudyPlace, we should follow Wikipedia policies and guidelines, except as explicitly noted and discussed in our Policyguide page.
Here are the main sources for Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
[edit] Tools
- To start a new article.
- To include a portal or activity logo. These will help orient readers to the site.
- To insert a tip. These will help us share know-how.
- To insert a critique. These should go on Talk pages, not directly into articles, but they should be calls for serious effort to improve the intellectual quality of an entry.
- Here is some help on setting up a course in StudyPlace.
[edit] Know-how
Enter items here that may be fairly esoteric but useful to know when you need to know them.
- A template for a hub page is Template:Hub. It will set up a two-column page with the site color, etc.
- Purging the Cache: Occasionally a change will not show because MediaWiki is returning a cached version of the page. In the rare event that you will need them, here are instructions for purging the cache.
- Colors: To set colors, background or text, it is best to use hex-code for RGB colors. Here are two sources matching colors with codes, the basics and in detail. For helpful background, see web colors and RGB color model.
[edit] References
- ↑ MediaWiki is not the same as Wikimedia, the site for coordinating the activities of the Wikipedia Foundation, which coordinates all administrative matters pertaining to Wikipedia and its associated sites, including MediaWiki. StudyPlace uses the MediaWiki software platform; it does not come under the organizational umbrella of Wikimedia.
