Misplaced Pages

1. Sign Your Posts on talk & discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date; three tildes will produce your name only; five just the date.
   
2. Don't forget to use the Show preview button; it saves a lot of wear and tear on the computers, and keeps the various wiki lists clean of lots of unnecessary entries. Also, please don't forget to fill in the Edit summary.
3. Questions? ==> check out Where to ask a question, Village pump, or ask on someone's talk page XXXX
   
4. Write to the target audience: A related question, is who should the pages be written for? Most writers are in college or past college. However, there is evidence that most readers are high-school students, or others not too familar with a topic. (Else, why would they be looking it up in an encyclopedia?) What is obvious or of minor relevance to a CS student or grad, may be very unclear or important to a high-school student, someone who is thinking of returning to college, or just someone looking for information (but not a learned treatise). Of course, Misplaced Pages has yet to define its target audience very well.

• Discussion of Reading level

Really, Really Important things

• For content errors in an article, click on edit this page or discussion at that particular article.
• Sign Your Posts on talk and discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~).
• Don't sign Encyclopedia entry pages, but do fill in the Edit summary block.
• See Page history to see who has previously edited a page.
• See the discussion page to see what these Misplaced Pages editors have said about the edits in progress. Check the watch tab to make sure you will see any later changes to a page in your My watchlist page. Check out Writers' rules of engagement.
• See Vandalism in progress to report persistent vandalism. If it's serious, maybe 3RR violation or request for Administrator intervention, or if it's really, really serious: WP:ANI.
• See Help desk for questions about editing on Misplaced Pages.
• See Reference desk for factual questions (about everything but Wikimedia— e.g., "Who is the current Pope?") not yet answered by Misplaced Pages.
• See Village pump (policy) for Misplaced Pages policy questions.
• See Village pump (technical) for Misplaced Pages technical help.
• See Village pump (assistance) or Village pump (miscellaneous) for any other (Misplaced Pages) help that does not seem to fit into an accepted category.
• See Village pump (all) to browse all village pump topics at once.
• See Village pump (proposals) or (perennial proposals) to check if an idea has already been proposed/discussed.
• See General complaints for discussions on things that could be fixed or made better.
• See Third opinion or requests for comment or edit dispute for help resolving an editing dispute.
• See Resolving disputes to resolve issues between/among users or for making a user conduct dispute complaint. Remember, Don't disrupt Misplaced Pages to illustrate a point!
• See MediaWiki support page if you need help with your own Wiki.
• See Wikimedia Meta-wiki to view other Wikimedia projects.
• See Peer review for incisive, constructive criticisms from others on a finished article.
• See Mirrors and forks to report sites that copy Misplaced Pages content.
• See Citing Misplaced Pages to know about citing Misplaced Pages. e.g., in a bibliography.
• See MediaZilla to make wiki software bug reports and feature requests.
• See Alternate Sites For When The Main Misplaced Pages Server Is Down You should bookmark the sites noted because once Misplaced Pages is down, you won't be able to access this page.
•    IF YOU HAVE REALLY MESSED UP A PAGE, and accidentally saved it, simply click on the history tab (at the top) and then click on the date immediately preceding that of your change, then click on edit this page, then save the resulting page. This will revert the change.
•    Do Not Attempt to Rename, Move, or Copy a Page Simply by Copying Its Contents; See Renaming, moving, copying a page.

Spelling/Grammar checking

Whenever doing anything but minor editing, copy and paste to a word-processor with real time spelling/grammar checking!

(or use a tool-bar with a built-in spellcheck such as Google Toolbar.)

Information & Resources for Contributors & Editors

More Style Stuff:

See also

Other Links:

Map of Misplaced Pages Informational Documents:

Summary:

• Write first for the Educated Layperson (that's hard... But I would suggest using the "New Scientist" as a style example).
  • ...then try to do it better and write for the beginner (that's harder)
• If an educated layperson can't figure it out by following the wikilinks, then it's too hard.
  • Yes, we're experts (more or less) but we're writing for a general audience. We could write a clever, concise, deep sentence to explain something...but it's useless if it isn't easy to understand.
• Eschew argot, jargon, technicality and cant.

Formating:

How Users Read on the Web

• See Help:Editing

<!-- and --> (For hidden inserted comments.)  

Indenting by one space causes this box to form and suppresses certain codes.

Images

To insert an image into an article, edit the article and insert

]

For example, ]]] Gives you the image on the right, where the caption is a wiki-link.

To have an image deleted, edit its description page and put
{{deletebecause|redundant to image FOO.jpg}} (but of course you would insert the name of the FOO.jpg image. Everything to the right of the | is comment. )

Redirects

• Help on Redirect
• Misplaced Pages Redirect (formatting)
• Avoid the dreaded Double redirect and self-reference.

#REDIRECT ]

To go (back) to a Redirect Page itself (e.g., to change or delete the redirect), use the link in the (Redirected from Redirect Page) line, which appears at the top of the target page, just below the line '.' (For this line to appear, you must first Go to the Redirect Page.)

Box Formats

Formatting ISBN

• simply typing ISBN 3-540-60521-5 produces the special reference display ISBN 3-540-60521-5

$$$ Barnstar:

Be generous in your Barnstar awards.

Test Templates:

'Test' Templates for newcomers' greetings and vandals' 'greetings.'

HTML Colors:

HTML Colors for use in color=color Misplaced Pages (named color) codes, e.g., in place of the color=#FEDCBA98 (hexidecimal color) codes.

AFD

As an AIW member please review Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/List of relationships with age disparity and please take a side.

Right to a voice on schools

Sorry to bother you, but deletionists are trying disenfranchise those of us who believe that all established and verifiable secondary schools are significant enough to be kept or at least merged. If you agree that it is not an "aburd" belief to hold, please give your opinion here: Misplaced Pages:Deletion_review/Log/2006_September_22#Finger_Lakes_Christian_School Kappa 22:32, 22 September 2006 (UTC)