Help:Editing Help
From Sunshine Review
This is the main page to turn to for assistance with editing questions.
Contents |
Editing Overview
- How to edit a page. Anyone, including you, can edit a page.
- Quick guide to editing.
- How to start a new page.
- How to contribute to Sunshine Review.
- Read about how to use talk pages, which will help you learn how to communicate with other Sunshine Review users about improving and adding to Sunshine Review's articles.
- What's the story with categories?
- If you'd like to help but want some direction about a good place to start, check out the Sunshine Review Projects pages.
Correcting text
For many people, this is the way they first decide to make the jump from reading a wiki to editing onw. You want to fix that typo, don't you? So, you click "edit", you find the spot on the page that you want to fix, you fix it, and you hit save. Easy!
Adding content
Say you're reading an article, and you think the author left out an important fact. Decide where your addition would make the most sense within the article, click "edit", and plug your addition in. Many people prefer to write their additions off line first, and copy and paste it into the wiki once they are satisfied with it. It's good manners to fill in the "summary" bar at the bottom of the page before saving your edits. That way, someone with an interest in the page will have a better understanding of what you changed and why you changed it.
From time to time there will be disagreement on what ought to be included in an article. That's fine, in fact it is often encouraged and can result in a superior product at the end. However, it is preferred that this type of discussion occur on the "discussion" tab at the top of the page, rather than by taking turns deleting someone else's contributions, and having them delete your own.
Creating new content
Once you are comfortable editing pages, and changing other people's content, why not add some of your own? There are two main ways to go about creating new pages, and they both involve using red links. A red link is a link that doesn't exist... yet. It is words placed in the double brackets that indicate an internal link ( [[ ]] ), meant to encourage (or remind) people to follow up on that subject. To use them for writing new pages use one of these techniques:
- Follow a red link with a topic that interests you
- Example: you are looking at the page of your home state and you notice that the link for the city you live in is red, so you decide to follow that link to create a page about your city.
- Find a page that would lead naturally to the topic you want to post about, and edit it to create a red link
- Example: you are looking at the page of your home state and you notice that the city you live in is not mentioned at all, so you decide to edit the state page to include a link to your city.
Portions of this article were taken from Ballotpedia under the GNU license
