Help:Contents
From Haircentric.com
You can build haircentric right now! First you create a user name and the you can start editing. Adding content to Haircentric.com can be as simple as you want it to be, at its most basic all you have to do is click on the edit tab and start typing your content. Although soon you'll be wondering how to Bold & Italic add headings and use all the other features that are available to you as a haircentric editor and contributer.
The cool thing about this style of webpage is that it allows you, the reader, to edit any entry you see in order to make it more accurate, more comprehensive, and simply better. It also allows you to add new pages to the wiki.
This is a quick & dirty guide to editing and creating wiki articles. If you want to do more than the basics, try reading Wikipedia's entry on How to Edit a Page. _TOC_
Contents |
The sandbox
If you haven't used wiki markup before, consider playing around in the Sandbox before you start editing other pages.
Editing existing articles
We hope that, as you start looking through the haircentric wiki, you will start to see pages that make you think, "Oh, I know more about that" or even "That's not right!" Our hope is that you will start editing the existing pages to add your own information to our store of knowledge.
To edit a wiki page, click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page. This will take you to a page where the entire text, as it exists currently, is shown in a text box on your screen. You can edit anything in that box: add stuff, delete stuff, move stuff around. Just start typing away! (A small hint: it will ignore singleton returns, so if you want a new paragraph, press Enter twice.) Alternatively, you can edit only a single section or subsection by clicking on the edit links on the right side of the screen.
Links to other wiki articles
Making links is one of the most important features of a Wiki (or any webpage). If I'm writing an article on Female Pattern Hairloss , for example, it's a good idea for me to link to the Wiki article on Hair Loss. All I have to do is look it up in the index and find that the page is called "Hair Loss." So now, while writing about the Female Pattern Hair Loss, I can write something like this:
More General information about female hair loss can be found in our main [[Hair Loss]] page.
And my article will now say this:
More General information about female hair loss can be found in our main Hair Loss page.
(If there were no "Hair Loss" page, the link would be red instead of blue or purple. It's OK to link to a page that doesn't exist yet. You can then go create it, or leave it as a reminder to someone else that we need a page on that topic.)
Piped links
Sometimes you want to link to a particular article, but you don't want the name of that article in your sentence. For example, I might want the word "Human Hair" in one of my articles to link to the page on "Hair Extension" To do this, you can follow the name of the article to which you're linking with a pipe/bar key and then the word you want to appear in your sentence. Thus
As well as synthetic hair, [Hair Extensions|Human Hair]] is also used.
becomes:
As well as synthetic hair, Human Hair is also used.
External links
If you want to link to a page outside the wiki, you CAN just type in the URL (including the http://), and it will automatically create a link, like this: http://www.wikipedia.org. Better style is to put the URL in single brackets, followed by the text you want on your page. Thus
The most comprehensive wiki-style encyclopedia is [http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia].
becomes:
The most comprehensive wiki-style encyclopedia is Wikipedia.
E-mail addresses
You can post a link to an e-mail address by typing
[mailto:Bob@Chimp.com]
Which will appear as:
mailto:Bob@Chimp.com
Better style is to add the name of the recipient, just like we added the name of the webpage in the above example:
[mailto:Bob@Chimp.com Bob]
becomes:
Bob
Saving your changes
We highly recommend you click "Show preview" before you save the changes you made -- it's easy to create a broken link that you'll just have to go back and fix. When you're satisfied with your changes, type something brief about your edits into the "Summary" box and then click "Save page." Voila! You've just edited a wiki article!
Creating new articles
Want to create a new wiki article to describe your favourite hair salon or celebrity hair disaster? Great! Here's how:
First, come up with a good name for your article. Ask yourself what people are likely to search for when they're searching for the info that will be in your article.
Now you have two options to actually create the article:
- Create a link to it from an existing article. The link will appear red, and when you click on it you will have the option to edit the new article.
- If there's nowhere sensible to create a link to your page, you can also create a new page by changing the URL in your browser's address bar to http://www.haircentric.com/wiki/YourPageNameHere
Either way you'll get the familiar edit page. Type away to your heart's desire, preview, and then save your page. Now sit back and admire your work -- and wait for someone else to come along and edit it!
Besides choosing a logical name, there are two good ways to make sure people will be able to find your new article when they're looking for the information it contains: categories and redirects.
Categories
Many of our wiki pages are on topics that can be sorted into broader categories: Hair, Hair Loss, Celebrity hairstyles and so on. (Here is a full list of our current Categories.) When you've written your article, decide which categories it fits in. Then, at the very bottom of your page, add that category like this:
[[Category:Hair Loss]]
Now your page will show up in the listing for whatever category you chose. Remember, a single article might fall under several categories. You can put several of these categories in a row.
Redirects
A redirect is an article that just points people towards a different article. You may choose to set up redirect pages if there are terms you think users might search for when they're looking for your page. For example you may think that a page on 'baldness' should point to a page on 'hair loss'.
To do this by create a page called "Baldness" and type the following (and nothing else) in that page:
#REDIRECT [[Hair Loss]]
This should only be done if no page exists on the term you think should be redirected. That is if a page on baldness and a page on hair loss aready exist with diferent content they should be left as seperate.
There is a lot more to say on creating a new Wiki article, like how to make headings and bulleted lists. However, this page is only a brief introduction to the basics of wiki creation. For more information, please follow the below links. (And if you think something should be on this page and isn't -- then edit this wiki article!)
External links
- Wikipedia's article on How to Edit a Page
- Wikipedia's style guide. We try to follow these guidelines here, so if your article doesn't match this style, don't be surprised if it gets edited.