Help:Contents

Introduction
If you know nothing about wikis at all, then your first stop ought to be to read some of the information at Wikia, our hosts. Wikia is part of the Wikimedia foundation - the same people who brought you Wikipedia!

Your next port of call should then be their basic tutorial, which will equip you with all the main know-how you'll need to work on this wiki.

If that's all too confusing, though, then here's some help from our good selves:

Editing Pages
To edit existing pages, click the "edit" tab at the top of the page. You can do this for absolutely any page on this wiki. Anything is editable by you.

That'll take you to a page that's got a box you can type in. That box contains the "code" for that page. (Wikia uses a really simplified coding system to make it extra-easy to edit pages.) If you change anything in that box and hit the "Save page" bottom at the button then you'll have edited that page.

If you press one of the row of buttons above the box, a piece of code will appear where the blinking cursor in the box is. Those buttons will put in for you all the most common pieces of formatting and coding you'll need: bolding, italicising, adding links, and so on. If you need other bits of code, check out Wikia's help pages for what you need. Another clever trick is to edit a page that's got the formatting you want on it and then copy/paste the bit of coding onto the page you want it on!

That's the basics of editing. It's much easier than it sounds! Give it a go. Write a haiku on this page (or improve someone else's).

Creating Pages
Of course, this wiki is going to need new pages as well, so you need to know how to create one. It couldn't be simpler! All you do is edit a current page (presumably the one you want to link to it), and type the name of that page inside a pair of square brackets.

So, for example, if I wanted to create a page entitled "Staplers Are Fun" I would type a pair of opening square brackets "'", followed by the words "Staplers Are Fun", followed by a pair of closing square brackets "'". Then press save and look at the page you just edited. Voila, Staplers Are Fun!

That'll create a page with nothing on it, and the link to it will appear in red (as with the above). Click on that link and starting editing your newly-created page!

Talk Pages
Every page of this wikia has a "Talk Page" which can be edited in exactly the same way as an ordinary page. It can be reached by clicking the "Discussion" tab at the top of the page.

Talk pages should be used to discuss whatever's on their associated page. If you wanted to ask a question about a piece of information, consult before making a change, suggest adding a whole new section, or basically say anything to do with that page, do it there! Make good use of the talk pages; they're a good way of communicating about what's happening on the wiki.

Uploading Files
The only files you can easily upload to wikis are media files--image and sound. If you want to upload one of those, click the "Upload file" button in the box to the right headed "toolbox", and follow the instructions there.

However, one of the main uses of the EI Wiki is to be a resource pool for all sorts of documents which you can't ordinarily upload to wikis, especially pdfs. What we're doing at the moment is uploading them to an external site and then just linking to them--have a look at the Resource Pool for examples of this. So if you've got such a file and want to put it on the wiki, you'll need to upload it to some permanent webspace somewhere. If you don't have access to that webspace, then plenty of people on the EI Working Group do--contact one of them! Alternatively, e-mail the EI mailing list about it.

Anything Else?
Is there anything else you think there should be something on this help page about? Well, go to the Talk Page for this page and tell us about it!

Haikus
Five syllables, then

Five, then seven. And a break

somewhere in between.

-H.