Help:Editing

This wiki is a work in progress, and you can contribute! These instructions will help you get started.

Some guidelines to remember:

• Don't be afraid to make edits. When you change something, the old version gets archived, so nothing is ever lost, and we can fix mistakes if we need to. If you see something that needs correcting, just go ahead and do it.
• Be sensitive about personal information. When writing about living people, avoid details that could lead to identity theft, like full birthdates or social security numbers. (The site is private, but there's always a small risk of someone circumventing the protections.) Also avoid sharing personal details that a living person may not want shared. When in doubt, get their permission first.
• Ask for help if you get stuck. There are plenty of quirks that take experience to figure out. You might also have some great new ideas that need special-purpose coding to make a reality.

Overview

Typically, you'll edit the wiki by either modifying an existing page or starting a new one. To modify an existing page:

• Click the "Edit" tab at the top of the page, or
• Click "[edit]" next to a section title

To start a new page:

• Click on a link to the page's name from some other page (the link should appear in red), or
• Type the new page name in the Search box and click on the result, or
• To start a new File page, click "Upload file" in the sidebar

In any case, you'll end up in an editor window, which displays the page's content in plain wikitext (see "Formatting", below) and allows you to make changes. You can experiment with your changes by switching between the "Wikitext" and "Preview" tabs; when you're done, click "Publish" or "Save Page" (these both mean the same thing).

Every page has a history, which is a record of every change made to the page. Click on the "View history" tab of a page to see it. When you save an edit, you'll add a line to the history. When you save a page, you can fill in the "Summary" box to provide a description of what you changed, or check "This is a minor edit" if you just made a small change; these will affect how your edit appears in the history. However, in practice, these aren't much use and you can just leave them blank. You may also want to make a lot of edits to a page in a single session, which will show up as a lot of lines in the history—that's fine, and you shouldn't worry about making the history look pretty.

You may want to experiment with the editing process, or with some special features, before working on a live page. You can use your user page for this purpose—just click on your user name at the top of any page, and write anything you like. (These user pages can be viewed and edited by every other user, but nobody cares what you put there.)

Discussion Pages

Every page has a "Discussion" tab at the top. If you'd like to make a note about the topic of the page to share with others, but aren't sure you want to edit the page itself, the discussion page helps you do so.

To add a note:

• Click on "Discussion" at the top of the page
• Click "Add Topic", also at the top of the page
• Fill in the "Subject/headline" box with an appropriate heading
• Type your note in the large editing box
• At the end of your note, click the "Signature and timestamp" button to add your name and date (in the edit window, this will look like --~~~~, but that will get replaced when you save)
• Click "Publish"

To comment on a topic someone else has created:

• Click "[edit]" next to the headline
• Add your note to the bottom of this section
• At the end of your note, click the "Signature and timestamp" button to add your name and date (in the edit window, this will look like --~~~~, but that will get replaced when you save)
• Click "Publish"

Formatting

The software used to generate the site is called MediaWiki. The same software is used by Wikipedia. One thing the MediaWiki software does is take some plain text containing special punctuation and turn it into a formatted web page. In order to edit pages, you need a basic understanding of this special punctuation, called wikitext.

Some examples of the most important features:

== This is a section title ==

This is a normal paragraph.

A blank line is used to start a new paragraph.

If you leave out the blank line,
then everything appears in the same paragraph.
It doesn't matter how you break up the adjacent lines.

=== This is a subsection title ===

Words can be ''italicized'' by using two apostrophes in a row (not to be confused with "quotation marks", which don't cause any special formatting).

You can link to [[Another Page]] by surrounding the title in two square brackets.  Sometimes you want the text of the link to be [[Another Page|something other than the page name]], and you can do that using a pipe character that separates the page name from the link text.

You can link to [http://www.example.com any web page] by enclosing the URL and the link text in single square brackets.

It's often useful to make lists.
* Each line that starts with an asterisk is formatted as a bulleted list item.
* This is the second item in the list.
* And this is the third.

This is a {{Template Application}}.  (See the next section for details.)

For more details, consult the MediaWiki documentation:

• General formatting
• Links
• Lists
• Tables
• Images

When editing, there's a toolbar that helps with the most common formatting tasks—just click and the appropriate wikitext will be generated.

Templates

Templates are a powerful feature of MediaWiki that allow page content to be automatically generated. By applying a template within a page, you embed whatever the template generates. For example, the template "Root Family" looks up the name of the main family for this wiki. In wikitext, templates are applied using two curly braces:

the root family is {{Root Family}}

This would be displayed as: "the root family is Jim and Ruth Smith". (You can try it yourself on your user page—click on your name at the top of the page.)

Templates are stored as wiki pages, with names that start with "Template". For example: Template:Root Family.

In most cases, a template application also provides parameters, which are extra values that control what the result will look like. For example:

{{Wikipedia|Monkey}}

This generates a link to the Wikipedia article about monkeys. The template is Template:Wikipedia, and the parameter value, after the pipe character, is "Monkey". This template happens to support an optional second parameter, which produces the same link with different link text:

{{Wikipedia|Monkey|an article about monkeys}}

The first parameter, the article name, has value "Monkey"; the second parameter, the link text, has value "an article about monkeys".

Some parameters are named, meaning they need to be identified using a particular name. For example, on the Welcome page, the pedigree chart is generated by the following wikitext:

{{Pedigree| {{Root Family}} | generations=5 }}

The Template:Pedigree template produces a pedigree chart, starting with a particular family, and displaying up to a certain number of generations. The "generations" parameter is named: its value is provided by using that name, an equals sign, and the value, "5". (Also note that the value of the first parameter, the family to start with, is generated by another template—template applications can be nested.)

Most page types have a corresponding template that is used to identify the page and generate a header. These templates include: Template:Family, Template:Locale, Template:Territory, Template:Region, Template:Photo, Template:Document, and Template:Data File. They tend to have so many parameters that it's often convenient to spread the template application out over multiple lines. For example:

{{Family
| Jared Stevens
| Mariah Jones
| grandparent family=Abraham and Cynthia Stevens; Joseph and Hillary Jones
| child family=Eric and Marjorie Jones
| marriage year=1920
| parent birth year=1890
| parent death year=1988
| residence=Cook County, Illinois
}}

It usually doesn't matter if you put extra line breaks or spaces before or after parameters—the extra space will be ignored.

Family Pages

A basic family page looks like this:

{{Family
| Father Birth Name: FAMILYSEARCH-ID
| Mother Birth Name: FAMILYSEARCH-ID
| grandparent family=Father Parents Page Name; Mother Parents Page Name
| child family=Child Page Name
| marriage year=NNNN
| parent birth year=NNNN
| parent death year=NNNN
| residence=First Residence Locale; Second Residence Locale
}}

{{Family Footer}}

This provides a basic page structure, with links to the mentioned families and places. A more complete family page describes details of the family members' lives:

{{Family
| Father Birth Name: FAMILYSEARCH-ID
| Mother Birth Name: FAMILYSEARCH-ID
| grandparent family=Father Parents Page Name; Mother Parents Page Name
| child family=Child Page Name
| marriage year=NNNN
| parent birth year=NNNN
| parent death year=NNNN
| residence=First Residence Locale; Second Residence Locale
}}

== Parents' Childhood ==

Summary of father's childhood.

Summary of mother's childhood.

== Married Life ==
 
Overview of this time period.

{{Timeline
| NNNN: Event description
| NNNN: Event description
| NNNN: Event description
}}

Details about this time period.

== Parent Name's Later Life ==

Overview of this time period.

{{Timeline
| NNNN: Event description
| NNNN: Event description
| NNNN: Event description
}}

Details about this time period.

{{Family Footer}}

See Help:Family Pages for an in-depth discussion about these pages.

Place Pages

There are three kinds of place pages: locales, territories, and regions.

Locale pages describe counties or similar areas. Their names usually include a comma, followed by the name of the enclosing territory (e.g., a state). For example: "Cook County, Illinois".

When you mention a place on a family page, you typically want to refer to the locale, using a link ([[Cook County, Illinois]]). After saving, if the locale doesn't exist, there will be a red link that you can click on to create it.

A basic locale page looks like this:

{{Locale}}

{{Locale Footer}}

Locale pages are useful for collecting information on cemeteries, landmarks, and other places of interest. A more complete locale page looks like this:

{{Locale}}

== Places of Interest ==

=== Name of a Place of Interest ===

Located at {{Google Map|Address, City State}} in City.  Description of this place of interest.

=== Name of a Place of Interest ===

Located at {{Google Map|Address, City State}} in City.  Description of this place of interest.

{{Locale Footer}}

If the territory page (named after the comma) does not exist, the new locale page will contain a red link that you can click on to create it. Territory pages describe states, small countries, or similar areas. Territory names do not contain commas—it's just "Illinois", not "Illinois, United States". A basic territory page looks like this:

{{Territory
| region=Name of a Region
}}

{{Territory Footer}}

You probably won't need to create region pages, but the full list of regions can be found here: Category:Region.

See Help:Place Pages for an in-depth discussion about place pages.

File Uploads

You can upload files, including images and data files, to the wiki. Each file is stored on its own page—something like "File:Jared Stevens Portrait.jpg".

To upload a file, click "Upload file" in the left sidebar. You'll be asked to locate the file on your disk, give it a name, and add a description.

The file name will default to whatever it's called on your disk. Feel free to give it a different name. This will be the name of the file page, and be used whenever the file is referred to, so choose something descriptive but short.

The "Summary" you see on the upload page is actually the contents of the file page. For a photo, this should look like:

{{Photo
| year=NNNN
| family=Family Page Name
}}

For a document or data file, just use a different template:

{{Document
| year=NNNN
| family=Family Page Name
}}

{{Data File
| year=NNNN
| family=Family Page Name
}}

See Help:File Pages for an in-depth discussion about file pages.