Wiki Editing

 I finally took the time to do my first wiki editing at opensuse.org today. With over 1700 pages available to go through, it can be a little overwhelming as to where one should start to help with managing all this information. Since the Artwork group has been my first stop at getting involved with volunteering my time to helping the openSUSE community distribution, I narrowed down the pages to those that are sub-categorized under Artwork.

 As I usually do, I jumped a little ahead of myself by wanting to add images into this particular wiki page and although it seemed like a relatively simple procedure, it turned out to be more. Wiki editing is actually pretty fun for people who enjoy working with documentation or writing articles such as myself. The software in use is called MediaWiki and is really easy to use.

 Follow along and I’ll explain the process I went through to add a screenshot of my desktop to a page where others are sharing their desktops for future development ideas.

Obviously, the first thing a person needs to do is contact the wiki administrator or whoever is “primarily” in charge of maintaining the overall effectiveness of the wiki pages. As a community driven operation, anyone who has a registered account with openSUSE has the potential to be able to edit wiki pages if they should choose to do so. There are guidelines to follow and a list of protocols to go with those guidelines. Obviously, since this is a community effort, we still have to have rules so that we don’t get a bloated mess going on. We want to keep the overall wiki organized and professional otherwise it will not work to be an effective source of information for others to follow.

First, I took a look at the page layout to get an idea of what people were already doing so I could follow suit.

Then I determined I would have to upload an image from my computer into a an image repository location where it could be referenced as a link so it is rendered in the wiki. This is essentially the same logic that goes on with any web page.

Once the image file has been uploaded for use, I personally recommend verifying that the image has in fact been uploaded and is valid in the image repository for access by the wiki. I feel it is always good practice to double check things.

After getting the image uploaded take note of the image name or even better right click and copy the image file name and paste it into a text editor for dropping into the page editor. Now navigate back to the wiki page that will be edited and in the upper left corner click on “edit”.

This will change the page to the editing console which will be an html based editor. Since our goal is to put our image in and retain the same formatting as what others have already established before us, I suggest copying the code previously used by someone else and then edit their image file to the one that was just uploaded for use. Note how the text editor for page editing should be under the tag heading of “Wikitext”.

When editing is all done, of course the next thing to do is to check our editing before we save the file as edited. Back up at the top next to the “Wikitext” tab is the “Preview” tab. Click on this and a temporary version of what the page will look like with the changes will appear.

It took me a few tries to get this right mainly because of having to learn how to work with the image files. If for any reason the editing doesn’t look the way it was intended to, down at the bottom of the page are the options to save, cancel and others. I suggest not worrying too much about going through a couple of times before getting it right but try to be both conscious and courteous when adding or editing anything to a community wiki page. Remember, people from all over the world turn to these pages all day long every day for help managing their system or navigating through for information about the organization.

Last of all is the final addition to the wiki. This is just a small addition to helping to make a good thing better by contributing knowledge, experience or just taking the time to fix or update old data.

I think there is a large misinterpretation of wiki pages. In some cases there may very well be a single moderator or maybe even a small team of maintainers. With a community driven project such as openSUSE, we really appreciate all the help people can apply to maintaining the wiki pages. With each new distribution release the page count continues to grow and as more and more of the community becomes involved, more and more pages continue to pop up throughout the site. There are a few dedicated people who have been working with the pages for a long time and believe it or not, they know just about every page. If maintaining a wiki is something that sounds like fun, don’t be shy to ask questions and get involved! We would love to have all the maintainers and contributors we can get!

“Have a lot of fun!”