General reminders

tinWiki users/contributors,

Lots of activity is going on in tinWiki recently, with many new articles, improvements of existing articles, and generally lots of nice improvements of the encyclopedia being done. Congratulations especially to everyone who have taken up an activity which you may not have done before, namely writing in and editing wiki pages. It's fairly fun stuff, these wiki things, in my opinion.

A couple of things I want to mention:

1) Please always enter an image into the the Image description page if you are going to display it in an article. Unlike Wikipedia, we don't have the option of hosting images inside the wiki itself here, and that means we don't use the standard MediaWiki display code. If we did, there would be a link from the image and to a special information page for just that image. As an alternative, tinWiki has an Image description page where all images used in tinWiki articles shall be listed with information about copyright status, and the username of the person submitting the image to be used in tinWiki.

2) Encyclopedic articles should not use abbreviated language, but should use proper, spelled-out language. Wrong: "it's". Correct: "it is". Wrong: "don't". Correct: "do not". And so on.

3) All encyclopedic articles in tinWiki are supposed to begin with a sentence stating immediately, in a full sentence, what the topic is. If the article is called "tinWiki", then the topic is, you guessed it, tinWiki. The article's absolute first sentence should be a full sentence describing what tinWiki is. Example of a first sentence in an article about tinWiki: "tinWiki is an encyclopedia wiki that focuses on 'alternative knowledge' topics, and is written collaboratively by anyone visiting the website who wishes to contribute." Please start every articles with a full and concise description like that. It can also be more than one sentence, of course, but that's how all articles should begin. If you see an article lacking a proper introduction, feel free to write one yourself, or add the Fix banner to the article.

4) The language in tinWiki's encyclopedic articles should not speak from First Person to Second Person. All language should be without this sort of perspective. Example of wrong language use in this way: "I think you will agree that tinWiki is a practical addition to ATS." Correct use: "Several ATS users have expressed that tinWiki is a practical addition to the ATS discussion forums." Also, don't add strong personal emotional feelings, like "The Roswell case was a totally disgusting media farce." Or something like that. Such language does not belong in an encyclopedia. Use very neutral and plain language, for example: "Many of the involved persons have stated that the media coverage of the incident did not seem very truthful." Not sure those were good examples, but I hope you see what I mean.

5) When discussing articles using discussion pages, notice that there won't be anything visible other than what you put there, unlike here in ATS where each post is clearly marked automatically as far as who the poster is and when the post was made. Therefore, discussion posts in tinWiki need to be signed manually. There is a toolbar that can help with this: the second button from the right will insert the signing code. You can also finish your post by manually typing in this signing code, four tildes ~~~~. If you sign your posts, you make it a lot easier for those who read your post and try to follow the discussion. Also, if you're not bringing up a new topic (basically starting a new thread), reply under the post you are replying to -- maybe indenting your post by beginning it with a colon character ( : ), which is the code for indenting. Only new topics of discussion need headers. I've noticed that lots of users have the habit of putting a header over a reply to a post, but that practice is a bit of 'over kill' and makes the discussion more difficult instead of more simple to follow when some time has gone by and there may be several topics discussed in the same discussion page.


There's probably a couple of other small issues like this to mention, but I couldn't think of any more right now. Anyway, be serious when contributing to tinWiki, but also remember that it's supposed to be enjoyable. :-) Feel free to use your user page to place in stuff you want there, experiment in the sandbox with wiki codes, read through the help pages and learn both style guidelines and how to do things with wiki codes, and also feel free to comment on anything and everything you might have an opinion on, either by writing in discussion pages or by writing here. tinWiki is a collaborative project, that's what this type of wiki is all about, it's about you the user.

Optimist


edit: unintended smiley....

[edit on 17-6-2008 by Optimist]

Howdy Optimist, I could not agree more with what you've said and I know that I am in some of those problems. Ill start adding images to the Archive I have not really been doing any of that. Thanks for addressing some of our Wiki issues.

Take Care You'll Fox

Thanks for the info on the pictures. I wasn't aware they didn't go into that list.

Didn't know you had to add not only to your wiki topic but to image archive too...

ho-hum...

Will try to sort that all out later..

And i also had not really read up on what the discussion section was for but now I have a clear idea of it and already got a few thoughts to put down..

Thank you.

Also, it is a good idea to upload your images to the ATS member upload space before putting them in an article. The reason is that hosts like image shack only allow a certain amount of bandwidth and then they stop hosting the image for a certain amount of time. That really makes the website look terrible. I have slowly but surely going over the images that are hosted elsewhere and saving them and uploading them onto ATS and then replacing them in the articles, but it is time consuming work.

So it is a suggestion rather than a rule to upload the images this way, but if you do it it is appreciated.

Hey WOS, im going to start replacing all my old pictures with new ones uploaded from ATS here, is it possible to get alot more upload space with out me spending ALOT of ATS points on this? Its just ive added 30-40 articles of which 30+ good size have pictures, and i know that im going to have to buy alot more upload space.

Fox

Sorry, that is the only way to do it. However I threw you a few points to help. If you ever run out just let me know. You are entitled to alot of points with all of the editing and new articles you have created.