Getting started

Welcome, new editor of the DE4A documentation wiki!

Before you beging adding content, you can familiarise yourself in on this page with some basic wiki rules and functionalities.

==> Additional help is available in the Wiki cheat sheet, the User's Guide, and the MediaWiki FAQ.

Ground rules

#1 Create from search. When you want to create a new page, start by searching the wiki for existing content. If the search yields no results, you will be offered the option to create a new page. If you do, make sure your search was capitalised in Title Case.

#2 Page names in Title Case. Page names are capitalised using Wikipedia rules. When in doubt, use this Case Converter tool to find the correct capitalisation. Different letter cases produce different wiki pages. For example, "Interaction Patterns" and "Interaction patterns" will lead to two different pages (the former exists on the DE4A wiki, the latter does not and should not, as it does not follow the Title Case capitalisation rule).

#3 Ask for help. Don't hesitate to contact the WP2 Team for advice and support when or before adding your content to the wiki. We're here to think along and help.

Creating and editing pages

Starting a new page

You can create a new page from a search or from a red link. In both cases, please observe the Title Case capitalisation rule (#2) above.

==> For more details see Help:Starting a new page.

Editing

You can edit a page with the Visual Editor or the Source Editor. The Visual Editor provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It contains a handy page searching function when inserting links. Visual editing is chosen by clicking the Edit tab at the top of a page (or on a section-edit link). The Source Editor can be used for additional functionality with such things as categories, hyperlinks, tables and columns, footnotes, inline citation, special characters and so on. You can access the Source Editor by clicking the Edit source tab at the top of a page (or on a section-edit link).

==> For more help with the editing interfaces see Help:Editing_pages and the Visual Editor User Guide.

Links

The most relevant two types of hypertext links in this wiki are internal links to other pages in the same wiki (commonly called "wikilinks") and external links to pages at other websites.

To create a so-called internal link to a page on the same wiki (a "wikilink"), use double square brackets wiki markup, [[like this]]. When you preview or save your changes, you will see a link that can be followed to the target page. If the page exists the link is displayed in blue; if the page does not exist, the link appears red (so the [[like this]] link is actually rendered like this). Following such a "redlink" to a missing page (whether or not it is actually red) will enable you to create the page.

To markup any arbitrary string of text (not necessarily a page title) as a link, use a "vertical bar" or "pipe" character, like this: [[Main Page|our project]] results in the link our project.

The first letter of the link target is usually not case-sensitive, meaning links can be capitalized or not (so How to contribute and how to contribute are equivalent). However, the case of every subsequent letter must match the target page exactly (so How to contribute and How To Contribute are not equivalent). Spaces in the page title may be represented as underscores (so How to contribute and How_to_contribute are again equivalent), but using underscores in links will make them visible in the page text (but this can be prevented by using a "pipe"). Please refer to rule #2 above when naming pages to prevent creating duplicates.

If the page title you are linking to is that of the page you are editing, the result is not a hyperlink at all but simply bold text (for example, on this page the markup [[Getting started]] gives the result Getting started). If you're trying to create a wikilink to the current page, you probably want to link to a specific section or to an anchor within the page. You do that by adding a "#" between the page name and the section name: [[#Ground rules]] will lead to the #Ground rules section.

Please note that links open by default in the same browser tab.

==> For more details see Help:Links.

Formatting

Formatting text to bold, italic, bulleted or numbered lists, tables etc. is most easily done in the Visual Editor.

If you prefer to use the Source Editor, you can format your text by using wiki markup. This consists of normal characters like asterisks, apostrophes or equal signs which have a special function in the wiki, sometimes depending on their position. For example, to format a word in italic, you include it in two pairs of apostrophes like ''this''.

==> For more details see Help:Formatting and the Wiki cheat sheet.

Sections

links within page to sections, section headers as links to dedicated pages

Uploading files

Files

Uploading

Images

images & image maps; documents

Special pages

Special pages are pages generated by the wiki software on demand for special purposes, usually related to project maintenance. Useful DE4A wiki special pages include:

All pages
All files