Help:Quick Tutorial
From Mbawiki
Contents |
Introduction
This website allows the MBA participants at Insead (initially) and everyone interested to develop a knowledgebase colloboratively. Most of the help given here is specific to the MBAs who would be contributing to this wiki as a partial fulfillment of the evaluation for the ISM Core Class.
User Accounts
Anyone who wants to write new pages or edit existing pages needs to be logged into the system. Those who want to just read the pages need not be logged into but we recommend registering with us and logging into the website.
Create User Accounts
Creating a user account means that you supply a username (your real name or a nickname) and a password. The system will reject a username that is already in use. A user account is created only once. You are then "logged in". Next time you log in you supply your username again and demonstrate with the password that you are the same person. Edits you make are recorded under your username. To create an account, select Log in (top right of page) then create an account.
What happens when I login ?
- Other users will be able to recognise you by your username when you make changes to pages.
- You will have your own user page where you can write a bit about yourself, and a user talk page which you can use to communicate with other users.
- You will be able to keep track of changes to modules you are interested in using a watch list.
- You will be able to Renaming (moving) a page.
- You will be able to set your own preferences, to change things such as:
- The number of pages displayed in Recent changes
- The fonts, colours and layout of the site, by using different skins.
- You may be evaluated and given credits upon the contribution you made to the system.
- You will be able to mark an edit as minor, which avoids inconvenience for other users.
Navigating
Search
You can search the pages existing in this wiki by entering keywords into the search box found on the left margin on every page. The search is case sensitive. Results matching your search are diplayed then in a decreasing order of relevance. If you search for a page which is not existing, the system asks you whether you want to create that page. You can see the name spaces in which the search is performed checked at the bottom of the search results page.
What links here
Every page on the bottom left has a link labelled "What links here" also called as a "backlink" . The pages linking to and/or embedding the given page are listed. The What links here facility can be used to see which other articles contain links to one you are interested in. To see this information, choose the what links here link while looking at any page. A list of articles which links to the specified page are displayed chronologically, from old at the top to most recently linked at the bottom.
The list of links to an article is useful in a number of ways:
- It gives a very rough indication of how popular a page is. Pages with many links are likely to be viewed often and should therefore be of the very best quality. Pages with few or no links may not be very popular.
- Where the subject material of an article is unclear, the list of articles linking to it might provide useful context. For instance when presented with a stub about John Smith that gives only his date of birth and death, viewing the list of links to the article might reveal that he won a gold medal in the Olympics.
- Facilitates proper disambiguation.
Random page
Every page on the left navigation panel has a link labelled "Random page". Clicking this link will take you to a random page in the wiki's main article namespace. Pages such as redirects will be omitted.
Editing
If you want to create a new article just search for that title in the search box to see if an article is already existing with the same name or having the same purpose as your article. If you find none then you will see a link Create this page. Click on that to start creating pages. But before creating new artciles or editing existing articles, we recommend you take the following editing tutorial.
To get help on editing pages please refer to Editing pages
Tracking Changes
Recent Changes
The Recent Changes page lets you see the most recent edits made to pages in this wiki.Using this page, users can monitor and review the work of other users, allowing mistakes to be corrected and vandalism to be eliminated. There is a link to the Recent Changes page at the top of each page and in the sidebar of each page.
Understanding Recent Changes
With the default preferences, the bulk of the page consists of fifty lines, one for each edit, looking like this:
- (diff) (hist) . . Algorithms; 10:06 . . superman (Talk) (Add examples)
- (diff) (hist) . . N Computers; 10:06 . . Brion VIBBER (Talk) (New page)
- (diff) (hist) . . Endnotes moved to Footnotes; 10:05 . . Maveric149 (Talk)
This indicates three edits: the first by a user called superman, to Algorithms; the second by Brion VIBBER to Computers; and the third by Maveric149 to Endnotes.
From left to right:
- "diff" links to the diff-page for this edit; it is not available for new pages, or for page moves
- The "hist" link corresponds to the Page history link on the edited page: it shows not just this edit but also older and newer ones. For page moves, the hist link leads to the history of the new page title
- A bold m indicates that the user marked the edit "minor".
- A bold N indicates that the page is "new", i.e., previously did not exist. It is possible for a change to possess both the "minor" and "new" indicators; this is typically used for new redirects.
- The next link is a link to the current version of the page in question.
- 10:06 refers to the time in UTC. You can change the time to your time zone using your preferences
- The next link is a link to the user homepage (as usual with internal links, the view page if the page exists, the edit page if it does not, the two being styled differently).
- Finally, there is a link to the user's talk page (the same remarks regarding existence apply).
- For page moves, a link is given to both the old and new title.
Watching pages
Anyone with an account may choose to be notified when a certain page changes using the "watch" feature and "my watchlist". This wiki does not let people "own" pages; however, the watchlist feature, along with the ability to revert changes, keeps interested users involved in particular pages without the drawbacks of giving someone absolute control over a page.
When logged in, there is a link "watch" or "unwatch" at the margin of each page. By clicking on that link, you add the current page and the corresponding talk page to the collection of pages you "watch", or remove them, respectively.
Watch list
When the user is logged in, every page has a link to the user's watchlist, also accessible by the link Special:Watchlist. It approximately functions as a custom recent changes just for pages that you watch. It gives a list of all watched pages, ordered backward according to the time of the last edit of the page, optionally up to some cutoff time.
Page History
All editable pages on Wikipedia have an associated page history, which lists all changes made to the page in reverse-chronological order. This may also be referred to as the revision history or edit history.
- To view a specific version, click a date.
- To compare an old version with the current version, click cur.
- To compare a version with its predecessor, click last.
- To compare to specific versions, tick the right-column radio button of the newer version and the left-column radio button of the older version, and then click the "Compare selected versions" button.
- Minor edits are denoted as m.
If your new pages edits aren't to your liking, don't panic; you can 'revert' the page to any previous version.
