Meta:Introduction to wikis
From Emissions Wiki
A wiki (WICK-ee or ˈwiː.kiː) is a type of website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change some available content.
This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki also refers to the software itself that facilitates the operation of such a website.
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How to Contribute
On this wiki, anyone is free to create or modify articles! There are many ways to help out. Here are a few ideas:
Editing Pages
In order to begin editing pages, you will need to register for an account. Don't worry, the process is very simple. Look at the top-right of the page to find a "log in" button, then fill out the information on the page that appears and you'll be editing articles in no time.
Once you have an account, all you have to do to modify the page you're reading is click the "Edit" tab above the page's main heading. This will display the page and the page's edit box below. Simply enter your changes into the edit box and click the "Save page" button, and your generous contribution will be instantly visible to all the visitors to the page.
If you want to try out a few edits without fear of messing up a page, you can use the sandbox. It's the perfect page to learn how to edit and test Mediawiki markup.
Oh, and don't worry about messing something up. Wiki pages keep track of all the changes that have ever been made to them, from the most recent edit back to the very first version of the page! Nothing is ever really lost, so dive right in!
Wiki markup
Mediawiki sites have a fairly complex and unfamiliar formatting syntax. To learn how to format your pages, please check out Help:Editing (and try your new skills in the Sandbox). There you can learn everything in a quick and easy reference!
Templates
You can use templates to help give your guide a consistent appearance between its pages and with other guides on the site. See the template help page for information about how to use this powerful feature.
Discussion pages
Every page also has an associated "talk page" that can be viewed by clicking the "Discussion" link on the right-hand sidebar. These pages are usually used to aid collaboration between multiple users who are all making edits to the page. If you have any questions about a possible edit you'd like to make, you can always ask other users by using the talk page.
Helping others find your article
To help other people find your new article, you should place it in several categories. We already have some categories set up. To add a page to a category, simply type [[Category:NAME]] at the end your article, replacing NAME with the category name you would like to use. To put your page into more than one category, just duplicate that line and change the name.
