Help:Contents

From Anabaptistwiki
Revision as of 14:53, 1 July 2010 by Jacobs8 (talk | contribs)
Welcome to the Global Anabaptist Wikipedia Help Page
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The Global Anabaptist Wikipedia Help Page has numerous resources, guides and models to help you understand how this wikipedia is structured and how to contribute content. Here you can learn about creating and editing articles, stories and sources through a basic description of the editor and a basic description of wiki-code. You can also learn about our categorization system and how the site is laid out.

To understand the basic guidelines and non-technical policies surrounding Anabaptistwiki and to get a general overview of the site, please visit our About Anabaptistwiki page.

Most of the basic information that Anabaptistwiki users will need can be found at the following sites:

  • If these pages don't help a quick google search will likely answer your questions.

New Users to the Wiki

Welcome to the Global Anabaptist Wikipedia! We are grateful that you have taken the time to visit our site and engage with the global Anabaptist community. Since you are on the help page you probably have some amount of interest in contributing content or in helping the site. Every time someone edits or writes one article, story or source, it helps global interaction immensely so we thank you once again for contributing your time and energy.

Some places to get started on your journey through the Global Anabaptist Wikipedia:

  • To find an article, story or source, you can type what you are looking for in the search bar on the left hand side of the screen to see if we have an article, story or source written on the subject.
  • If you are feeling a bit more adventurous or want to go exploring through Anabaptist culture, you can go to the Main Page and start browsing by country or Anabaptist family tree members.
  • Yet another way to start navigating your way through the site is to visit the sources page or stories page. On these pages you will be able to work your way down through a category tree to find what you are looking for.

Creating an Article

Looking to create an article for the Global Anabaptist Wikipedia? Great, but first there are a few steps you must take before you start creating your masterpiece.

  1. Does your proposed article have any connection to the Anabaptist community? If it does not have any sort of connection or if the connection is weak, you might want to take a different approach to the subject that would recognize a stronger connection.
  2. Is your article going to be a factual account of a congregation, event, person etc.? Articles on Anabaptistwiki present information that can be validated by other sources and aren't opinionated in nature. If you are looking to write an opinionated article, you should look into writing a story which span the entire spectrum of opinion.
  3. Does your article already exist on the Anabaptistwiki? Do find out, do a quick search for your proposed article in the search bar. If your article does not show up in the list of results then you are ready to continue. If it turns out your article is already created, you have a lot of your work already cut out for you. Simply read through the article and add any additional information that hasn't been included already.
  4. Will you be able to link your new article to another higher level page? For example, you want to create an article named "Anytown Mennonite Church." You would be able to link this page to the country's page where it is located, its relevant conference page and maybe some important individual's page who attended that church. In this way, the "Anytown Mennonite Church" article would be connected to three other pages and would be found easily by people using the site. If you cannot find a place to link your article, whether it be another article or a category, your article will be orphaned and nobody will be able to access it except through the search bar.

If you are good on all the above accounts then the next step is creating your article. To create an article here is what you must do:

  1. You must first create your new article page. There are two ways to do this.
One way is to go to a page that you are eventually going to link your article to. You then are going to go into edit mode and add a link to your (as of yet nonexistent) article in an appropriate area on the page. Save the page and get out of edit mode. The link to your nonexistent article should be red. Click on this red link which will bring you to

Editing