Contributors
From Encyclopedia Islam
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Becoming a Contributor
If you are interested in becoming a contributor for Encyclopedia Islam, please send an e-mail to admin@encyclopediaislam.org with some information about yourself, the reason you would like to be a contributor for EI, the sections in which you're most interested in contributing to, and a sample essay showcasing your writing talent. If you do not have a sample essay available, then ensure that your e-mail is written well and adequately demonstrates your writing abilities.
Editing Help
Encyclopedia Islam is powered by the MediaWiki site engine, which powers the Wikipedia. The syntax for producing well-structured, organized, and visually-pleasing pages within MediaWiki is very simple and elegant. Knowledge of markup languages, such as LaTex, HTML, or others is very useful, but not required, to understand Wiki markup.
Unless otherwise noted, most, if not all of these styling techniques can be combined together in a logical manner.
Linking
Linking to another article within a wiki is as simple as wrapping a two pairs of square brackets ("[[" and "]]") around the title of that particular article. For example, typing:
The [[elephant]] let out a huge roar with its trunk.
Would produce the following in a wiki page:
The elephant let out a huge roar with its trunk.
If you would like to insert text different than the title of the article you're linking to, then simply insert a pipe character ("|", usually located near the enter key) after the article's title and then whatever text you'd like. So, typing this:
The [[elephant|big, grey, multi-ton mammal]] let out a huge roar with its trunk.
Would produce this:
The big, grey, multi-ton mammal let out a huge roar with its trunk.
Note how both links link to the same article, but use different text.
However, what if the article you're linking to doesn't exist yet? In this case, MediaWiki produces a link to the edit page for an article with the title you used. Therefore, an easy way to create new articles is to link to them in an existing article, and then follow that link to create the new page. It is this very simple and elegant technique that allows for amazingly easy and quick page creation within MediaWiki.
Emphasis
For most content, your language, word choice, and tone can help determine exactly how you want your reader to understand what you're trying to say. However, sometimes that just isn't enough. Boldfacing and italicising words, when used sparingly, can convey additional meaning to what you're trying to get across to your reader. To italicise a word or phrase, surround it with four apostrophes, two on either sides. Doing this:
The elephant let out a ''huge'' roar with its trunk.
Will produce this:
The elephant let out a huge roar with its trunk.
To embolden a word, it is very similar to italicising, except you do it with a set of three apostrophes on either side of the word or phrase you wish to embolden:
The '''elephant''' let out a ''huge'' roar with its trunk.
Will produce this:
The elephant let out a huge roar with its trunk.
However, sometimes, only emboldening or italicising a word just isn't enough...and you can only convey the true meaning of what you're trying to say by italibolding it. So, from elementary school, we recall that 2 + 3 = 5.
The '''elephant''' let out a ''huge'' roar with its '''''trunk'''''.
Will produce this:
The elephant let out a huge roar with its trunk.
Now that you have the power to embolden and italicise nearly everything and anything, I encourage you to utilize stronger language and vocabulary rather than emboldening and italicising to make your point.
Lists
When it comes to styling in MediaWiki, four styling elements are absolutely crucial to nice layout and presentation:
- Emphasis
- Lists
- Headings
- Line breaks
Hey...how did I do that? Well, it's really very simple!
- Create your list
- Type out each element of your list on a new line
- Prefix each line with an asterisk character("*")
MediaWiki actually supports two types of lists, just as HTML does: numbered and underordered. An asterisk will produce an unordered list. To produce a numbered list, replace the asterisk with a pound sign ("#").
*This *is *how *you *do *it
Produces this:
- This
- is
- how
- you
- do
- it
The first character of a list (either an * or a #) must be all the way to the left, with no spaces preceding it, otherwise it not be recognized, and just appear as plain text.
Headings
Headings are used to partition an article into various sections and subsections. In addition, MediaWiki has a built-in table-of-contents generator that will automatically display when you have a structured article (usually it requires an article to have two or more sections of more than one level, such as a section with a level 2 heading and another section with a level 3 heading).
There are six (6) levels of headings. To create a heading, simply wrap your heading title with a set of equals signs ("="), one set for the level number of your section. Therefore, a level 2 section would have two equals signs on either side of its title. For example:
====A level four heading====
Would look like this:
A level four heading
Headings should start at the left-side of the page, with no spaces preceding them, otherwise they will be ignored and shown as plain text.
Conclusion
That pretty much wraps it up for the quick EI MediaWiki tutorial. With this small set of techniques you should be able to produce elegant and cohesive articles within EI. This tutorial will be extended as additional features become available or necessary for a consistent and elegant look-and-feel to EI.
As always, you can always e-mail me if you have any questions, but please do not edit this page except for grammatical mistakes or to make the language clearer.
