EvaWiki:Boot Camp for Newbies

This page is meant to train newbies who have no idea how to do things using the MediaWiki layout of the site *whatsoever*, in the basics of how to do things on EvaWiki.

What do those buttons on the top of the page mean?

You can see several tabs on top of each article. The one on the far left, the one actually selected, is the actual "article" page, for the article you actually want to read. Clicking "Discussion" leads you to a "Talk" page for the article: basically its like a piece of note-paper taped to the article, which editors write notes to each other about things in that particular page (more on Talk pages will be explained below). "Edit" is the tab you click to actually make changes to an article.

The "History" tab leads you to the History page for an article: it lists all changes that have been made the the article, in chronological order, who made those changes, and dates them. You can click on "diff" to see what changes an edit made to the page. There is also a "Move" page, which is basically used for renaming an entire page: it moves the article to a new page, and actually automatically creates a redirect which links every page which was originally linked to the old name, to the new one. Depending on your user privileges, you might not be able to to "Move" pages. You're really only supposed to Move pages occasionally, and unless an article name is mispelled or something obvious, you should tend to discuss moving a page with other editors before moving it (go to the "Talk" page and say "I think this should be moved to (new name) because...". If you do not have user privileges to Move a page, it would be a good idea to directly ask an Administrator to move it. There is also a "Watch" button, which adds pages to your "Watchlist", basically your Favorites list.

The links in the extreme upper right are for your own account on EvaWiki, not related to the page you are looking at. Clicking on your screename taks you to your user page. Please fill this out (copy the format you see on other user's pages). "My preferences" takes you to your preferences page (you don't really need that). "My Watchlist" shows you what looks like a "History" page, but which actually shows you only the recent changes that have occurred on pages you have clicked "watch" on (that you have favorited). This helps you keep track of articles you are concerned with, or just plain interested in. "My Contributions" lists only edits made by you, in chronological order.

How do I know what is currently happening on EvaWiki?

Other than site announcements on the main page and such, MediaWiki format has a link labled "Recent Changes" in the "navigation" bar you see to the left. Click that to see the the changes that have occurred most recently, on any page of the site. It's basically a combination of all of the "History" pages from every article on the entire site, letting you see the most recent edits to everything at once. That's usually a good gauge of what's being worked on at the moment, or "in the news".

How to make Edits to an article

The most basic thing you need to start out with if you have physically never tried using MediaWiki before, is how to Edit, that is "make changes to", an article.

First, locate the "edit" tab on top of the page. Click it and it will take you to a "Editing (page's name)" page. Write what you want. When you've finished writing what you want, look below the editing box: there is a "summary" box, in which you may write a note to the other people editing the site, explaining why you made the change you did, etc. You don't necessarily need to write anything there, and it doesn't serve as an "official" notification of stuff, but it's a nice feature to have. Below the "Summary" box are three buttons. The one right on the left says "Save Page": click this button to make your edit actually happen.

There's also two other buttons, "show preview" and "show changes", which both basically preview the changes you are making. You don't really need those, though they help, as you can edit as many times as you want, so if you are unhappy with something you've changed you could just instantly change it back. There is also a box which you can check which says "this is a minor edit". This leaves a little tag in the "Recent Changes" list which lets other editors know "this is a minor edit". Please just click "minor edit" for things like spelling corrections and such. This isn't really enforced or anything, but please don't do something like routinely erase an entire paragraph of information you don't like, listing each edit as a "minor" one. Sometimes you might just accidentally click "minor edit" when you're clicking "Save Page" (happens all the time). Don't really worry about this, just please use your own judgment and try to list something as a "minor edit" only for spelling corrections, etc.

Besides the "Edit" tab on the top of the page, some pages have subheadings which have their own "Edit" tab. You do not absolutely need to use these, because you can just edit everything on an entire page by using the "Edit" tab on top. However, if you want to edit only a specific subsection of an article, in a very long article where it might be confusing to try to edit the whole thing at once, click this secondary "Edit" tab to just edit one subsection.