How to use
From Informationism.org
O.K, If you've used Wikipedia before it's all the same as that, otherwise read below:
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[edit] Logging in
First thing you've got to do is log in. You don't actually have to do that to use the site in a casual sense, but if you want to make any kind of decent changes to the site then you'll need to. You'll find the create account/log in thing at the top right hand corner of the screen. When you sign up the system will automatically send an email and you can log in and start doing things.
Part of the reason for the log in policy is to stop casual vandalism of pages, which is a problem on Wikipedia.
There are four levels of user on this thing:
There's random people who come in off the net: Their IP address is recorded when they edit. On Wikipedia they are practically encouraged to vandalise the site in order to make everyone else feel like they are in a besieged city. Here there is less they can do because more pages are protected. We don't need that crap.
"I just want to get along" - The Breeders
There's logged in users. This is what everyone is when they sign up for an account. this give a whole lot of other 'powers'. Like uploading things and editing most pages. At this point the ability to move pages is not assigned to logged on users. This is to help protect against vandalism.
When you log on you will see some other stuff come up along on the top of the screen: User name, my talk, preferences, my watchlist, my contributions, log out.
Clicking on the first of these take you to your 'user page' which you can put anything you like about yourself kind of like a myspace profile.
Then there's 'my talk' where you can have back and forward communication between people, a bit like the myspace comments. If you want to say something to someone else on the site you should to to their 'my talk'. You do this by going to any page they have edited, click the history tab and you should see their user name and talk page. Otherwise, to find someone, go to Special:Listusers which gives you a searchable list of all the users.
'preferences' give you a whole bunch of preferences like your email address and 'nickname' (which is your screen name). Don't worry no one can find out your email address, or real name if you don't want to. Not even me (Andrew Rutherford) I mean it might be in the system somewhere but I don't know how to access it!)
'my watchlist' is a bunch of pages which you're keeping tabs on to see what happens on them i.e other people editing or commenting on them.
'my contributions' is a list of pages that you have edited.
And 'log out' is obviously to log the hell out!
[edit] The 'Tabs'
Now, You'll see some 'tabs' along the top left hand corner of the pages by the logo: Article, Discussion, Edit, History and Watch.
'Article' is what you're reading. It's how the page looks when it's being read.
'Discussion' is where you can see what people are saying about the page, and this is where you talk with other people if there's a dispute about how to edit a page.
'edit' is the exciting bit, click this and the page is replaced with its underlying 'guts'. It may look scary but actually it's quite simple.
'watch' - By clicking this you can put the page onto your watchlist as above.
'history' - This shows you all previous versions of the page - it's 'edit history'. So if you go to a page and it doesn't have what you expect then you can go to the edit history and find it there. You can also 'revert' a page to an earlier version if that is necessary.
[edit] How to Edit
OK, now down to business. If you were to click the 'edit' tab then you will get a window with the text in a pane, in a scary looking format. But it's not that scary! Above the pane there are some buttons:
Bold, Italics, Internal link, External link, Level 2 headline, Embedded Image, Media file link, Math formula, Ignore wiki editing, Signature with timestamp, Horizontal line.
Actually it tells you all of that if you hold your cursor over the icon for a few seconds, which is true of most things on the edges of the page.
What they do:
Bold: If you highlight a word and click this it will be bold on the page when you save it.
Italic: Same as above
Internal link: If you highlight a word and click this it will become a link within this website. The page it links to doesn't have to exist yet. But if you make it a link, if someone clicks on it and then a page will come up saying that 'this page doesn't exist yet, but would you like to create it?' So this is a way to create a new page. Links where pages exist will appear in blue and where one doesn't, in red.
External link: This is for links off this site. It's easier to use than html formatting because you just put the URL (web address) e.g. http://www.postphilosophy.com/korea/ highlight it, click external link, then it would look like this: [1] to call the link something you just put a gap between the end of the address and the last bracket and then write it in e.g. [http://www.postphilosophy.com/korea/ Postphilosophy Korea] which looks like: Postphilosophy Korea. Easy hu?
Level 2 headline: When you start a new page, the headline will be created automatically from the page name, then within the page you can create subtopics by highlighting a word or words and clicking the Level two headline icon.
Embedded image: This is for putting an image in the page e.g: Image:Example.jpg (I'll put something there soon) You can upload images on the Special:Upload this is one of the many 'special pages' which you can find a list of at: Special:Specialpages there you can find many fun things, that I don't even know about yet.
To adjust the size of the image you put: |???px| after the image name in the link '???' being a number e.g for the image: Evil_dude.jpg you could put: [[Image:Evil_dude.jpg|250px|]] 
to make it that size or: [[Image:Evil_dude.jpg|250px|] to make it smaller.
If you then click on the image it goes to the full size.
Cool! I've just found out I can embed external images. You just pop in the address of the image. I really wanted to do that and now I can! I should calm down. e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/b/bc/Wiki.png
For more info on images go to this page
Media file link: I think this is for things like sound files, although I haven't been able to get it to work yet - See, I barely know more than you and I'm writing this! At the moment if you upload a sound file you may have to link to it as an external link but I'll try to fix this as soon as I can.
Math formula: I don't know about this, I suppose it is what it says in some way.
Ignore wiki formating: You can use this if you wan to show what wiki formating looks like without having to apply it as I did earlier with external link, or you can put a whole bunch of html with this before it. If you know html you can often apply it here as well, without having to necessarily put in that tag. E.g the 'br' tag is very useful for line breaks.
Signature with timestamp: The best place to use this is when you're having a discussion with someone and you want to identify yourself without having to type you name - You just click it and it looks like this: --Barnes 00:03, 20 August 2006 (CDT)
Horizontal line: You use this to start a new section it looks like this:
[edit] Some other stuff
If you want to reply to someone else's' comment or essentially use what 'tab' does on your keyboard then you just put a ':' between the start of the line and the first word.
- It looks like this
- you can put more e.g.: '::' to make a bigger gap
One other thing you can do for a quote or something is put a space between the start of the line and the first word and that gives you a box eg:
So I applied, basically...
At the bottom of the edit page you have three buttons:
Save page, Show preview and Show Changes.
Save page, saves the page and shows you what it looks like. Only click this when you've finished editing that page. For any tests or just to see what it looks like click:
Show preview, shows what the finished page looks like if you click save without having to save it and clutter up the page history (and show the world your mistakes)
Show Changes, shows what you have done compared to the previous person.
Well that about finishes that. If you have any other editing tips log on and share your knowledge on this page.
[edit] Creating a new page
To create a new page you can do it in three basic ways:
1: You can type it in the URL field after the title= and it will ask you to create one, if there isn't already one with that name e.g: http://www.informationism.org/index.php?title=Create new page
2: You can create a link in an existing page, and when someone clicks on it the 'create new page' page will come up.
3: You can search for something, and if it doesn't come up a 'create new page' dialog probably will. This is probably the best way to create a page in the public space, as it ensures that you don't double up.
If you want to create a page that you have primary control over, go to your user page and put it's name after your user name in the URL e.g. or me my user page URL is:
http://www.informationism.org/index.php?title=User:Informa3
So it would be: http://www.informationism.org/index.php?title=User:Informa3 create new page
Good Luck - have fun! --Barnes 00:03, 20 August 2006 (CDT)
[edit] Administrators
Above the 'logged in user level' there's 'admins' short for administrators: Now it's not like Wikipedia where there's this massive struggle for power over who can 'advance to the next level' and be an administrator.
At this point anyone can be an administrator, in fact I need em! All you have to do is want to be an admin and either be known or trusted by me (Andrew Rutherford) or known and trusted by an existing administrator.
As an admin you have 'awesome' powers like protecting or deleting a page which you shouldn't abuse or you won't be an admin no more!
