Help:Using this site

This page, Help: Using this site, gives guidance on how to use the The Falkland Historic Buildings Wiki, and also how to create new articles and improve existing ones.

For generic help on editing Mediawiki pages, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents.

Understanding the entries

There are pages for people, roads, etc., but the majority of the entries relate to individual buildings.

For a particular building, the box at the right-hand side gives a summary in tabular form. Most of these should be self-explanatory; The OS Grid ref is the Ordnance Survey's National Grid Reference, sometimes called "NGR". The first two characters are always "NO" for all the locations covered by this Wiki, and are followed by two 5-digit numbers, specifying the location down to the nearest metre.

Many of the buildings described are listed buildings, which have additional details in another box at the left.

Finding information

To find information about a particular person, place or other subject, type the subject in question in the search box at the top right and click "search". Note that the search facility only finds whole words.

Alternatively you could click "Random page" at the left to see an article chosen at random, or "Recent changes" to see which articles have been added or updated most recently.

You can also navigate between one article and another. Almost all articles have links to other articles. Links are shown like this - normally in blue, depending on your individual settings. If you click on a link it will take you to another article with more information about the subject in question. Links that look like this (normally red) point to articles that haven't been written yet: it's one of the aims of the project to turn all the red links blue by creating new articles!

Every article is also linked to one or more Categories (not to be confused with listed building categories!). So for example if you're looking at a page about a particular architect, you'll probably see Category:Artists and architects in a box at the bottom of the page. If you click on this it will take you to a list of articles about other architects. All the categories are arranged in a hierarchy below Category:Main categories which thus gives an overview of all the classes of information within this Wiki.

Becoming an editor

If you would like to contribute to the Wiki, you'll need to become a registered user. E-mail ross@foxearth.net with your name, email address, and a chosen "Username" for this site and you'll be set up as a user.

Before doing any editing yourself, it's best to look at some existing articles and seeing how they're structured. If you click the "View source" tab at the top of the page (or the "Edit" tab if you're logged in and its a page you're allowed to edit) you will see the article in the "Wiki markup language" that controls the formatting. Note the following examples:

• two apostrophes before and after a phrase in the markup make it display in italics, so ''something'' will display as something.
• three apostrophes before and after a phrase in the markup make it display in bold, so '''something else''' will display as something else
• enclosing a phrase in double square brackets will link it to the article in question (and display in blue if the article exists, otherwise in red), so [[Falkland Palace]] will display as Falkland Palace and clicking on it will take you to the Falkland Palace article.
• double equals signs before and after a phrase on a line by itself will create a section heading, so ==More information== on a new line will create a new section headed More information.

Starting to edit the Wiki

Once you've been signed up as a registered user, it's probably best to spend some time looking at articles and improving them before you create an article of your own.

If you find something wrong in an article, perhaps a spelling mistake, or something you know is factually wrong, click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page. This will show you the page in its markup form. Notice how this relates to the article as it's normally displayed. If you feel confident, just make the changes. To show what you've been doing, put a few words in the "Summary:" box at the bottom, to tell other editors why you made the changes. Once you're happy, click the "Show preview" box at the bottom of the screen and make sure that the article looks as you expect. If all is well, click "Save page" and the new version will be saved in the encyclopaedia.

Creating a new article

Before creating an article you should search to check that there is no suitable article that already exists. If an article on the topic you want to create is there, but you think people are likely to look for it under some different name or spelling, learn how to add a redirect with that name; adding needed redirects is a good way to help improve this Wiki.

If no suitable articles already exist, then you need to start a new article.

In the search box near the top right of a page, type the title of the new article, then click Go. If the Search page reports :"There were no results matching the query. Create the page "xxx" on this wiki!" (where xxx is the name of your subject in red) then you can click the red article name to start editing the article. If you're creating a page for a specific building, start by copying the contents of the Building_Template page.

Remember that others can freely contribute to the article when it has been saved. The creator does not have special rights to control the later content.

References

An article should always say where the information has come from (other than the most basic information such as the location of a street or building).Provide a source for any statement that might be contested, and for any direct quotations. Add the reference immediately after the sentence, surrounded by <ref> and </ref>, for instance:
<ref>"Obituary: Sir Paul Latham", The Times, 26 July 1955, page 11.</ref>
or
<ref>http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/consenting-adults.shtml</ref>

The references will appear as numbered footnotes at the end of the article.

See also

See also a page of sources that we've drawn on to create this Wiki and some external links.