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.
Many of the buildings described are listed buildings, which have additional details as follows:
- Listing ref: the reference used by HES (Historic Environment Scotland) to identify thebuilding in question
- Listing name: the name used in the HES listings; often these bear little relation to the current address or house name!
- Listing description: the formal description of the property from HES.
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 earch 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. So for example if you're looking at a page about a particular architect, you'll probably see Category: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.
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.