Help:Editing

Overview

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.

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, either 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.

Either way, you'll end up in an editor window, which displays the page's content in plain wikitext (see the next section) 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 edits in the history—that's fine, and you shouldn't worry about making the history look pretty.

Formatting and Templates

The software used to generate wiki pages 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.

=== 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.

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.

Family Pages

See Help:Family Pages for details.

A typical 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
}}

== 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}}