Tips

Also see the FAQ for Q&A on more general topics to do with this wiki business. See Tips/Templates for a list of helpful templates.

The Very Basics

Editing tutorial

Have you read the super simple tutorial on making your first edit?

Red links

Red links are links to pages that do not exist yet. When you click one, the wiki will send you to an edit form to start content for the page.

This means that an easy way to create a new page is to create a link to it, and then click the red link to start editing the new page.

Names identify pages

Each page (or article) is identified by its name. This page is called 'Tips'. You'll see the name show up in the URL for that page. You link to a page by using its name in brackets, [[Tips]] which becomes Tips. You can create a new page by putting such a link into an existing page, saving it, and then clicking the red link. Or you can just make up the URL and go straight to it.

Use the section edit link

If you're signed in, you'll see that each subsection on a page has its own edit link on the right. If you want to just edit one bit of text, use that edit link. You won't have to wade through all the other stuff that's on the page to find the bit you want to edit.

How to 'sign' something you write

It's easy to add your name and a timestamp to something you write. Just put in four tildes like this: ~~~~. It will show up like this: Maarten 14:21, 16 February 2007 (PST) You don't normally use this when you're editing an article or a Trail Info page, but more when you're leaving comments or feedback, reporting bugs, etc.

How to leave suggestions/feedback

Every regular page has a "discussion" or "talk" page associated with it. Take a look at the top of this page; there are tabs named "Article" (you're reading the article Tips right now) and "Discussion". If you want to make a suggestion for a specific page, don't put the suggestion in the article--just click the discussion link at the top, then edit that page. It's a bit like each page having its own web forum.

Alternately, you can leave notes for specific people and/or send them email. Each user has a "talk" page as well where you can leave them notes, e.g. User_talk:Maarten, or if they've enabled them, you can email another user by clicking on their name, and then the "Email this user" link in the lefthand column.

Or send a note to webchump@bbtc.org.

Beyond the Basics

Seeking a safe place to practice?

If you just want to mess around a bit and edit a page that no one cares about and no one really looks at, you can edit the Big Messy Playground. Or you could edit your own user page.

How do to simple formatting

Take a look at this formatting help and for more info, the other help pages.

When in doubt, copy an example

If you're not sure how to get something to show up right on a page, or how to fill out all those fields in the sidebar of a trail page, don't panic! Just look for another page that does the same thing, and see how it's done there. Go to that page, click the edit link, look through the text to find what you need. Copy/paste. You can cancel the editing by just closing the window, or by clicking the Cancel link at the bottom.

Adding a new page

Want to add a new page?

Your changes don't show up?

Sometimes you'll edit a page, save it, and your changes don't seem to show up. This is usually because the wiki server does some caching and hasn't realized that the prefab copy is now out of date.

Try this:

1. Force a full reload of the page. Firefox: hold Shift key while clicking Reload button. IE: ???
2. Force the server to throw away the cached version of the page. You do this by going to the page, adding ?action=purge to the end of the URL, and going to that URL.

You disagree with what someone wrote?

Rather than just overwriting what someone else wrote, consider leaving notes on the article's discussion page and forming an agreement about what the page should say.

What's with the "Trail:" prefix?

The trail info pages all have names like "Trail:Tiger Mountain". What's up with that?

The prefix before the colon indicates the "namespace" that the page lives in. It's a bit like having the wiki divided into separate sections. Other namespaces you may see are:

• the "Talk:" space (each page has an accompanying "talk" or "discussion page". For a page called "Foo", it's called "Talk:Foo"),
• the "User:" space (each user has a home page of sorts where they can say something about themselves, and a talk page (User_talk:John_Doe) where others can leave them messages
• the "Help:" space where "Help:Templates" would be a page with help about Templates.

So why are trail pages in the separate Trail: namespace anyway? I wanted to set it up so that when you create a new trail page, it's preloaded with the boilerplate text for a trail page. Putting trail pages in a separate namespace let me create a separate boilerplate template for those pages, but not have every new page start out with all that trail stuff.

How do I...?

If you want info on how things work in wikis, search on www.mediawiki.org and/or meta.mediawiki.org. If you can't find it, ask Maarten and I'll look into it.

Uploading images or other files

To upload an image, use the Upload file link in the toolbox on the left. Please pick a good destination name that describes the image.

To link to the file, use [[Image:Filename.jpg]]. Careful: file names are case sensitive. If your link is not working, check that you copied the title exactly. Adding pictures to the photo gallery at the bottom of a trail info page is a little different: you leave off the double brackets.

To embed an image that's hosted on another server, just stick the URL into the page, like this:

More information about advanced image formatting.

Embed a video in a page?

If you want at video to appear on the trail guide page (rather than a link that would take someone to another site), you use the <videoflash> tag. It's a little goofy, but not hard to use. The catch is that it's different depending on the site you use to host the video (YouTube, VholdR, Vimeo, etc.)

If you don't see the site you want to use here, then take a look at this page. If it's not there either, send Maarten an email to see if your site can get added.

YouTube

To embed a youtube video, find a link to its page, copy the video ID code, and use it like this:

<videoflash type="youtube">77iDIp40m9E</videoflash>

So you get:

VholdR

To embed a vholdr link, you have to find the file ID buried in the "embed" code. On a vholdr.com video page, click the "embed" button underneath the video, look at the stuff it displays and find the bit that says "file=http://vholdr.com/xspf/node/#####/emb" and copy the digits that appear where the ###s are. Also note the height and width. Let's supposed the id is 50448, and the size is 500x281. Then put this in the page:

<videoflash type="vholdr">50448|500|281</videoflash>

(separate the numbers using the vertical-bar character, usually found on your keyboard above the backslash (\).

Like this:

What about maps and GPS tracks?

You can add a map as if it's a picture. It would be cool to do something special with GPS tracks in the future, like mtbguru.com does. Want to help make it happen? Talk to Maarten if you're interested in helping out on this!

Can we change the info column that appears on each trail page?

That thing is generated by a template and then filled with the values given on each page. Please post suggestions on Template_Talk:Trailhead.

I can't edit the main page

Yeah, I locked that down, that's one of the few places where I think it's a bad idea to let just anyone muck around. Please send me suggestions for changes.