Editors Guide

From Pet Encyclopedia

Introduction

Welcome to the Pet Forums Pet Encyclopedia 'Editors Guide'. This editors guide has been created to help you understand how to contribute to the Pet Encyclopedia and edit existing pages and create new pages.

The 'Pet Encyclopedia' has been built using the successful MediaWiki software and can be edited and contributed to by anyone who has registered on our Pet Forums (http://www.petforums.co.uk) website. Dont worry though if you are worried about making mistakes or messing up a page in the encyclopedia, as every page has got a history of edits and if a mistake is made, then the page can be rolled back to the previous version.

The 'Pet Encyclopedia' has been created with the aim of becoming the internets best resource for all information related to pets, and hopefully with everyones input we will achieve this goal. The encyclopedia has seperate portal pages for each type of pet, i.e. a page for dogs, cats, birds, horses etc.. For each type of pet, there are two main kind of pages that can be created, firstly a 'pet breed profile' page which can be created for every pet type and pet breed which should contain all information related to that particular breed including a photo; secondly a 'pet article' page which should be used to create pet information pages for anything pet related, i.e. a dog article could be created for 'Dog Training' or 'Weaning Puppies'.

People are encouraged to add information to existing pages if they think the information will help improve the page, even if the improvement is only small. If everyone was to add even a bit of information, the collective effort would be great!

Registration

Before you can contribute to the 'Pet Encyclopedia' you need to become a member. Becoming a member is easy and free and gives you access to our popular pet community as well. To become a member you can register here.

Navigation

The Pet Forums 'Pet Encyclopedia' has been designed to be as easy as possible to navigate and find your way around. The first page you will see when visiting is the Welcome page. On this page you will notice that there is a seperate tabbed menu item for each type of pet, for example there are options for 'Dogs', 'Cats', 'Birds' etc. On each of these pet portal pages you can view the A-Z of Breed Profiles and Pet Articles. For example on the 'Reptile' portal page, you can view the A-Z of Reptile breeds and the A-Z of Reptile articles. You will also notice that on each of these portal pages, you can view the last 20 updated breed profiles and articles for that particular pet type.

If you know what information you are looking for and want to find it quickly, you can use the excellent search facility which is located at the top of each pet portal page and also in the left hand column of each page. If you search and the page exists, you will be taken directly to that page, if no page exists with that name but there are similar named pages, you will be given a list of the similar pages for you to view.

Creating a New Page

You need to be registered and logged in to the Pet Forums before you can create a new page. Before creating a new page in the 'Pet Encyclopedia', it is a good idea to firstly check that a page by this name or a very similar page does not already exist in the Encyclopedia. To do this, use the search box in the left column or at the top of one of the portal pages to search for the page name. When viewing the search results, if a similar page does not already exist then you can create a new page.

To create a new page you can use the 'Create Page' link which is located in the left column of every page under the heading 'Other Tools'. As you can see from this page, there is an option to create a new 'Breed Profile' or 'Pet Article' for every type of pet. To create the new page, just type the page title in the appropriate field and then press the 'Create' button, before creating a new page please view the 'Page Naming Standards' section below. As you will see each 'Breed Profile' or 'Pet Article' page which is created in this way will use a standard default template which has been set-up with pre-defined section headings already set-up which can be changed when editing. Also, each page created this way will be set-up to be in the correct category.

You can now start entering the text in the new page and when finished click on the 'Save Page' button at the bottom of the editing box. If you need help on formatting the page and creating new headings and sub-headings etc. Please view our 'Formatting a Page' section below.

Page Naming Standards

When creating a new page, it is important to give it the most appropriate title. When creating a new 'Breed Profile' page for any type of pet, the most appropriate title would be just the breed name of the pet. For example if you are creating a breed profile for a Jack Russell Dog, then the most appropriate name for the page would be 'Jack Russell'. If a breed has more than one name, for example a scientific name, then create another page with the alternate name and do a redirect to the original by putting the following at the top of the page as follows :

#REDIRECT [[NAME OF ORIGINAL]]

When creating pet articles for the various pet types, more thought should be given to the article title. Here are a few guidelines when deciding on an article title :

• Try not to capitalise every word in the title, just the first word.
• Do not start the page name with 'The' or 'How to' etc... This is so that the article can be categorised easier.

Copyright Guidelines

Please note that when creating a new page or editing an existing one, make sure that you do not copy other peoples material, including text and images to put on to the pet encyclopedia. All material you put on the encyclopedia should be your own work in your own words unless the material you are using is free from copyright.

Editing an Existing Page

You need to be registered and logged in to the Pet Forums before you can edit an existing page. If the page that you wish to edit does not already exist, then please create it by following the instructions in the 'Creating a New Page' section above.

Once you have opened the page that you wish to edit, click on the 'Edit' tab directly above the page. This will then take you from viewing mode in to edit mode where you can then edit the page. You can now make your changes to the page and when finished click on the 'Save Page' button at the bottom of the editing box.

If you need help on formatting the page and creating new headings and sub-headings etc. Please view our 'Formatting a Page' section below.

Discussing Page Edits

If you would like to discuss some changes which you propose to make to a page or some changes which someone else has already made to a page, you can create a new discussion thread in our 'Pet Encyclopedia Discussion Area' forum. To do this, when you are on the page that you wish to discuss, just click the 'Discussion' tab at the top of the page, and a new thread will be automatically created with the title of that page, where you can discuss the page changes. If a thread already exists to discuss the page, then you will be redirected to this thread.

Adding a Photo

Uploading a Photo to the Encyclopdia

Before you can add a photo to a page, you first need to upload the file and store it in the pet encyclopedia. This is done by clicking on the 'Upload File' link in the left hand column under the heading 'Toolbox'.

On the 'upload file' page, from the 'source filename' field, you can now select the photo file from you computers hard disk. In the 'destination filename' field you should give the filename an easy to understand name, for example if you are uploading a photo for the cat breed persian, give it the name 'Persian-cat-profile.jpg'. In the summary field, you can give the photo a more detailed description.

Now you can upload the photo to the encyclopedia by clicking the 'Upload File' button.

Adding an uploaded photo to a Page

Now that the photo is stored in the enyclopedia, you can easily add it to the page. If you are editing a 'Breed Profile' page, the page will have a section at the top for the image. All you need to do is enter the name of the photo file on the image line of the 'InfoBox'.

If you are editing an article page and would like to insert an image somewhere on the page you can use the following bit of code :

[[Image:name-of-image.jpg|thumb|350px|right]]

Also note that the image size can be changed slightly by altering the '350px' to be slightly larger or smaller. You can also align the picture to the left if you wish by changing 'right' to 'left'.

Formatting a Page

The following table shows how to format text in the pet encyclopedia page editor.

preformatted text is done with
a space at the 
beginning of the line

Creating Links

Please see the table below on how to create various links to both other encyclopedia pages and external websites.

Please note that when adding or editing text on a page, make sure that all references to other pet breeds or things which could be created as an article are surrounded by [[ and ]]. For example, "This dog breed is closely related to the [[other dog breed]]." This will turn the text into a link to the entry about that other dog breed. As a general rule, any word that is used that could one day become an entry in it's own right should be linked (usually only the first time it occurs).

Links which are BLUE will take you to pages which do exist; links which are RED means that the page has not yet been created, and clicking it will take you directly to the editing screen.

Categorising a Page

All pages created within the Pet Encyclopedia should be correctly categorised so that they appear in the correct pet portal section and can easily be found by our users.

We have 8 main pet types in the encyclopedia and for each pet type we have two categories. Each new page created should be entered in to one of these 16 categories.

If you create a page the standard way by clicking on 'Create Page' link in the left hand column your page will automatically be categorised by the correct category when you create the page using one of our standard page templates.

If however you create a page using a different method and then need to correctly categorise it, you will need to categorise the page yourself. A page can be put in a category by adding a category tag to the page (by convention, at the end of the page), e.g.:

[[Category:Category name]]

Substitute the actual name of the category in place of Category name. To be specific, in order to add an article called "Training a Puppy" to the category "Dog Articles", you would edit the article and add "[[Category:Dog Articles]]" (no quotes) into its page source at the end.

A full list of Categories are :

Dog Breeds; Dog Articles; Cat Breeds; Cat Articles; Bird Breeds; Bird Articles; Rabbit Breeds; Rabbit Articles; Rodent Breeds; Rodent Articles; Horse Breeds; Horse Articles; Reptile Breeds; Reptile Articles; Fish Breeds; Fish Articles

Empty Articles / Stubs

When a page in the Pet Encyclopedia has little or no useful then it should be added to the Stub category. This is to let people know that the article needs updating with some useful information.

To add a page to the Stub category, just add the following stub template code to the beginning of the page.

{{stub}}

To view a list of all current page which are marked as stubs, click on the link below. This is a good place to start for people who are looking to update existing pages which contain little information:

Current Pages marked as Stubs

Please remember to remove the 'stub' tag from the page once you have updated the article with useful information.