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!”

OpenSUSE Artwork Sharing

Hello again and thank you for stopping by!

In this how-to I’m going to describe the new avenue openSUSE has established for people to share their artwork with the organization and community. At some point the head honcho’s at SUSE felt it was best to provide an outlet that was public, easily accessed and easy to use so that we may draw from a larger pool of artists to help contribute to the artwork supplied into each release. The establishment is not only provided for wallpapers or boot splash screens, it is a repository of sorts where other fans and users of openSUSE can share and collect artwork provided by others from around the world.

Contribution to the artwork pool is completely voluntary and only requires a Flickr account and the acceptance from the artist that any donations to the pool be completely released from all creative rights so that there are no lingering legal issues. It is also stated that all contributions should be free from sexually explicit material, images portraying racism, hatred or graphically violent material. With that said, the following is a basic explanation of how to set up a Flickr account to share images with the openSUSE-artwork community.

The first thing to do is to set up an account with Flickr powered by Yahoo. There were a lot of reasons why Flickr was chosen and please don’t ask me why. Without going into a long explanation, the best I can say is that it is already well established, there is already a large following of community contributors and the engine for group sharing works really good.

As this shot shows, there are a few ways to create a Flickr account. The easiest ways are to either use an existing Facebook or Google account. If one of these buttons is selected, Flickr will detect the ID from that account automatically and ask for the password to that account which will then be the standard way users are signed in. Everything is kept confidential so there is no worry of having the password harvested. If the user doesn’t have a Facebook or Google account then a Yahoo account will do or a Flickr account needs to be created.

After the account has been created, I always strongly suggest that users take the time to created or upload a buddy icon. Doing this creates a level of identity so that group members can separate one person from another. Of course there is always the account name and other data that can relate the artwork back to the donor, but it’s nice to be able to have a visual representation to correlate to. Once the buddy icon is done, fill in all information that a person is comfortable sharing. Some people like to be very private about this kind of thing and that is completely understood.

When all account data is filled in to preference, then it is time to connect the new account to the openSUSE-artwork group account. This can be done in a couple of ways, either use this link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/opensuse-artwork/ or in the search box type in openSUSE-artwork. Unfortunately, Flickr is case sensitive so it can be challenging if the spelling isn’t just right. Once at the openSUSE-artwork account, click on the button to the far right just under the group title that says “join this group”. Now we are a member of the openSUSE-artwork group and when we upload images we can have them shared into this group which we will cover next.

Flickr has made uploading a very easy process. At the top of the account is the “upload” tab found at the right of all the selection tabs just above the account details. Click on this and a new window will open that is kind of a stark dark grey color and looks like this.

Read and follow the directions that are just below the large blue box. At this point, I believe openSUSE-artwork is only accepting images for donation to the pool, so for this example we are going to stick with that. Click on the large blue button and surf your drives and folders for the image(s) to be donated. Once the image is selected, the screen will change and we are presented with options to apply to our image.

By clicking on the box just below the newly uploaded image, details can be added such as program used to generate, location where taken, what camera was used and so on and so forth. In the left hand column are some selections that can be added to each image individually. In this area is where licensing is selected. I suggest selecting the second button which is the NonCommercial, ShareAlike,  CreativeCommons which releases the openSUSE team to apply our design to the organization if they feel there is a good place for it. Remember, the whole idea is a collaborative effort in sharing to create something awesome that works for everyone.

Go through each of the other attribute boxes and apply tags so other can search keywords and find the design or other attributes. The most important one for this example though is the “Add to groups” button. This is how we share uploaded photos with the group so everyone is able to view everyone else’s work and use or apply them to help promote the use of openSUSE everywhere. Clicking on this button should bring up this screen if our join groups selection earlier went well.

After selecting all the attributes to each image, remember to click on the blue “upload photo” button in the upper right hand corner. This button is how Flickr processes the photo adding all the attributes and making sure it gets added in all the right places.

Now we created our Flickr account where we can upload artwork to share with the openSUSE-artwork community. We then joined the openSUSE-artwork group where we can view work created by users and contributors from all over the world, and were contributing our skills and talents to help build something really cool and fun for everyone!

Visit the openSUSE-artwork wiki for more information: http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Artwork