Editing wiki guide

This guide is meant to help new members become acquainted with editing the Protospace Wiki (this website).

Since the information added to this wiki can be viewed by every member, editing the wiki is an easy way to make a large volunteer contribution.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a website with a collection of knowledge that can be edited by its users. In our case, the Protospace Wiki can only be edited by logged-in Protospace members.

Our wiki is powered by MediaWiki software, the same software that runs Wikipedia.

Basic Editing

Editing the wiki on your phone is an inconvenient mess. For simplicity, this guide will assume you're editing on a desktop (normal computer).

Logging in

Click the "Log in" link at the top right of any wiki page.
Log in with your Protospace username and password. These are the same as what you use to log into the member portal (Spaceport), the forums (Spacebar), and Protospace computers.
- If the log in fails, you may need to authenticate with Spaceport and then try logging in again.
- If you're unable to authenticate or you forget your username / password, do a password reset then try again.
- If you still can't get in please email directors@protospace.ca, they will be happy to help you.

Edit a page

There's two types of editing methods: visual editor and source editor (advanced). This guide will focus on using the visual editor.

Make sure you are logged in.

Browse to the page you'd like to edit.
Click the blue "Edit" tab somewhat near the top right of the screen. Don't click "Edit source" for now.
The page's visual text editor will load.
Edit the page however you'd like. You can use the toolbar above to format the text.
Click the blue "Save changes..." button on the right.
Enter a short summary of what you changed in the dialog box.
Finally, click "Save changes" to finish.

Create a new page for a tool

Tool pages have their own specific procedure documented here, please follow it.

The procedure is a complicated mess and beyond the scope of this guide.

Create a new page

To create a new page for something that isn't a Protospace tool, follow these steps.

Make sure you are logged in.

Type your desired page name into the search box on the top right.
Press enter.
- If the page already exists, you might see it in the search results list. You can edit it instead.
Click the red link in the "Create the page [red link here] on this wiki!" text near the top of the search results.
An editor page should open.
Make sure the "Create" tab is selected at the top.
Enter something, an introductory sentence, or whatever random text just to get started.
Click the blue "Save changes..." button on the right.
Enter a short summary of what you changed in the dialog box.
Finally, click "Save changes" to finish.

Additional info

Testing sandbox page

If you'd like to experiment with editing, feel free to edit the Testing page.

You can make any changes you want there to practice.

Tracking changes

All changes to the wiki are tracked and can be reverted if something breaks, so don't be afraid of editing things.

To view the history of a page, click the "View history" tab near the top right.

You can see all the recent changes to the wiki here: Recent Changes, or click "Recent Changes" on the left sidebar.

Editing source

Sometimes in order to use advanced features, you'll need to edit a page's source code.

You can click the "Edit source" tab on a page to change the source code that gets turned into formatted text.

Feel free to use this mode, you can refer to the syntax here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cheatsheet.