Wiki conversion tips
From Knowledgebase
Contents |
Ground rules
Wikipedia has hashed out a lot of the "how should we do ___" kind of stuff. It seems silly to duplicate their efforts. A great place to start would be with the Documentation for Editors
Do not take other's contributions or modifications personally; they're trying to help. Don't get into edit wars with people (IE, undoing each other's edits constantly). Try to stop and discuss the issue. Explain your reasoning if necessary on the discussion page (click on the tab at the top of the page).
Google is immensely useful at finding out how to do things (BD: For example, I searched just a few minutes ago for: Mediawiki "link to a category" to figure out how to link to a category without adding a page to said category.)
Things to keep in mind
Major stuff:
- Use reference instead of narrative writing style. "I went to the store and bought a gallon of milk, and then poured that into my crankcase" is a narrative. "Purchase a gallon of milk and pour it into the crankcase" is (usually) preferable.
- Sections. Please try to organize text into logical sections, with well worded headers. This makes articles easier to work on, since the software allows you to edit a single section instead of the entire article.
- If the article is short, will it fit nicely into another existing article?
- Could the article serve as the beginnings of an larger scope article? (IE, an article about changing headlight bulbs on a 5000 might be easily increased to encompass more models.)
Minor stuff:
- Spelling and grammar mistakes
- Itemize procedures (use # to start each step, one step per line.)
Linking
Use hyperlinking! One of the strengths of hypertext is its ability to present information succinctly, but allow people to dive into more detail where appropriate. For example, you should not go into great lengths to describe internal caliper brakes on the 200q20v or V8 model pages. Instead, link to [[Internal_caliper]], where a full description and maintenance information can be written. Look for existing articles to link to, if possible.
You can either enter "the 200q20v has an intercooled, turbocharged engine" and go on about the size and single-pass nature of the IC. Or you can create the article "Intercooler", give a brief general description, and then make a table that shows different models and their intercooler specs. Then someone working on "5000" doesn't have to spend time making a table for the different intercooler types in the 5000 line, and effort it is saved. This can be useful for other reasons - many of you know how frequently we see posts like "what's the difference between the 3B and MC intercoolers" and such.
It also works well for repair articles where several cars may share the same components. Another 200q20v example: the 200q20v, V8Q, and UrS4/S6 all share the same rear caliper and rotor. Maintenance can be covered in one article about the caliper, and then linked from all three, and put in all three model categories.
Perfection
- Feel free to paste in a direct copy from the old Twiki, submit it, and then work on that.
- You don't need to edit the articles to perfection, but try not to let bad articles sit unmodified.
- Edits do not need to be "big" or substantial to be useful.
- If an article looks really nice (or close to it), maybe we should add it to a category of high-quality example articles.
Page titles are important
Please carefully consider a page title. We can 'move' them later, so it is not the end of the world, but...
- Spaces are ok to use, and converted to _ (and back again.)
- Capitalize the first letter and proper names (ie like a sentence.)
- Keep it simple. It'd be nice if people can remember it.
- Look at a list of existing and established articles to get a feel for existing naming conventions.
Markup references
- Twiki markup reference. This is what we are converting from.
- Mediawiki markup reference. This is what we are converting to.
Categories
Categories help people find pages. They are automatically maintained by the wiki software. To add a page to a category, place [[Category:Name of the category]] at the bottom of an article. Please look at the the list of existing categories.
Templates
If we find a need to put the same text in many articles (IE, a safety warning), it is a good idea to create a template which can then be easily inserted in any articles where it is needed - such as {{dangerous}}, which shoould be saved as Template:Dangerous.
External links
Sometimes there are great explanations or discussions of a topic elsewhere on the web. Linking to them is a good idea.
Credit where credit is due
Please try to give credit where it is due. Some of us have been putting a paragraph at the end of the article (top would be OK too, I think) listing where content came from (usually a post to a list), and who contributed. You'll note some old Knowledgebase usernames in many articles.
If content looks like it was cut+pasted from another site, that's not okay unless we have their permission. Cut+pasted text is sometimes obvious due to writing style- or you can pick a long phrase at random and google it to see if it matches anything.
Editing software
It may be easier to use a good text editor (not a word processor like Word). For example, something that has find-and-replace functions. Any formatting (ie bold, italics, sizes, colors) you set in your editor will be lost when you paste it into the wiki.
- Brett recommends Smultron if you have a Mac (free.)
- Huw likes an old version of Arachnophilia, which will do a find-and-replace on all open files. It's "careware" and you can email me for more info.
