Help:Contents

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Help Guide
Under construction--please excuse the mess. Please see WMWillis/Tripartite Box Structure for an something of an idea of how this is supposed to look when reorganized. Bill 02:48, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Whether you are new to the Wiki, or an old hand, there are occassions when you may need a bit of help to figure something out. This page is intended to list the most useful "Help:" pages. You may find it convenient to refer to this page for guidance when problems arise. Its easy to edit a page on the Wiki, but with experience you're bound to run into more complex problems. This page may help you find the answers, though you can always drop a message on someone's "talk page" and they may be able to help you. But if you see a problem that doesn't seem to have a solution, please let us know---or if you figure out a solution to a problem, you might want to create a help page of your own to explain your discovery. Hey, we all need help from time to time, and we all go farther, faster, the more we help one another.
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Principal Help Pages
Here's a set of links to some of the most useful general purpose help pages

Genealogy Wiki Specific:
 * General editing guidance
 * Starting a new article page
 * Inserting images
 * Using templates
 * category:help

Wikia and Wikipedia help pages: 
 * Help on Wikia
 * MediaWiki Editor Handbook, the help pages for the software we're using
 * Wikipedia help contents
 * Wikia Central Help Pages
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Table of Contents

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Just Starting?
 If you can type and click, you can edit most pages on this wiki.
 * 1) Find a page to improve. ( If you want, you can practice in the Sandbox first. Its there for "practicing", or experimenting with something.  Its a good place to get use to how the wiki works.)
 * 2) Click "Edit this page".
 * 3) An "edit box" will open - type your new sentences or corrections (just like MS or Lotus or WordPerfect wordprocessing)
 * 4) Click the "Save" button - (well, it may be wise to hit the "Preview" button first, in case of mistakes!)
 * 5) You're now a Web Publisher. Welcome to the team!
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Box 2 Right
This is to be partly filled with the information in box far below---haven't figured out what the subset of information should be from that box. Some will go h ere, other information will go elsewhere.
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Box Bottom Center

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Below is additional guidance on frequently encountered problems, and or quick "How To" summaries

Templates

 * Note: These are not the suggested structures for pages, but the Wiki feature for inserting boilerplate.


 * Help:Templates
 * List of Templates


 * "Magic words" - Special group of templates, standard throughout MediaWiki, doing clever things such as referring automatically to specified parts of the name of the page they are on

Special Characters

 * There are handy lists at:
 * http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp
 * and
 * http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=HTML%20symbol%20reference

Signatures
Here's what our founder has changed his signature to in Preferences. It provides folks with a direct link to his Talk page to reply and so on (remove spaces in the nowiki tags):

< nowiki  > < / nowiki >]]&mdash;iFaqeer [[User talk:iFaqeer|(Talk to me!)

Example:  &mdash;iFaqeer (Talk to me!) 20:39, 28 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Creating Pages about Individuals
See Help:Starting pages and Help:Loading Gedcoms.

Privacy
The records here are meant to form a historic record for the families concerned. Please do not include private information about living individuals without specific permission from the individuals.

For more detail and reasons, please see our main privacy page.

Cultural sensitivity
Some cultures are sensitive to the recording of certain types of information. For instance, some tribes of Australian Aborigines forbid the viewing of images of dead people.


 * Australian Aborigines request that pages with pictures of deceased Aboriginal people be clearly marked as such so that the user can choose if they wish to view the page. See guidelines on Cultural Protocol.

Surname categories
There is (or is intended to be) for each surname a separate category, which in turn is a subcategory of the category for surnames in general. Edit or create a category link at the bottom of the individual's page to put that page automatically in the surname category.

Alternative spellings
Where you are familiar with alternative spellings (eg White/Whyte), please note them on the category page and if possible link to those categories. Other readers may not have known of the alternatives or thought to look there.

(See Help:Surname categories for more detail)

Material copied from Wikipedia
As we are on the same licence/license as Wikipedia, text from there may be copied if given proper acknowledgment. Please see Genealogy:Wikipedia.
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