Help:Contents

What's Wikipedia?

1. http://wikipedia.org - the largest encyclopedia in the world. Introduction at http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
2. Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia
3. Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia

Using

1. See the Help desk to ask questions
2. See the MediaWiki mw:Help:Contents for a much greater resource than what is found locally here.

This site uses a customized theme which means that the links are in different areas. Specifically, the main links are in the left navigation column, while "special" links are at the top margin and bottom of each page.

Editing Information

Adding or editing articles is very easy. There is a large volume of "help" information available at the main wikipedia site, so that effort is not reproduced here.

1. See the Help Table of Contents
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing
3. See the Editor's Handbook
4. The Cheatsheet (which includes links to the print cheatsheets)
5. What HTML is allowed?

Images

[[Image:foo.jpg]] produces an image You must first upload the image. You can not embed external images, with the notable exception that you CAN use 1.5 million images available in the commons project.

[[Media:foo.pdf]] would produce a link to a pdf document, so

[[Media:Ejbdesignpatterns.pdf]] produces a link to http://freephile.com/wiki/images/6/6d/Ejbdesignpatterns.pdf

• mw:Help:Images

Using External Editors

You can even use tools like OpenOffice or Eclipse to edit this wiki.

Editing from OpenOffice

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher Sun has a new extension to OpenOffice that allows you to write wiki articles from right in your word processor.

Advanced Editing and Customization

Please see documentation on customizing the interface and the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.

Linked Images

By default, this system is configured to show an image and link to it's description page. Sometimes, you want to use an image to link to a page of your choice. There are many ways to make mediawiki link images, but the most convenient that we settled on here is to use the Icon extension The syntax (described at Icons) is

{{#icon: Info.png|Info|24|floatright|Special:Help}}

To get your image to float left or right, wrap the

{{#icon}} in a div with the appropriate class like so:

<div class="floatright">{{#icon}}</div> Although I modified the Icon extension to be able to specify a class in the icon tag itself, the extension now reveals some weaknesses that make me want to change to the LinkedImage extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LinkedImage