Getting Started

Your First Steps


First thing: be creative. The site will only work if people write in it! So feel free to add, amend or correct pages. But bear in mind that this is not just a place to spurt your own thoughts. Instead maintain a relevant point of view to UMHC, and take into account that the entire world can read what you write. Indeed the UMHC website is highly ranked in Google results so many people do stumble upon us by chance.

The best starting point is to make a simple correction to an existing article. Correcting a typo or grammar mistake is very helpful. To do this, simple click the Edit link located on the left-hand side of the article. If you haven't already created yourself a username you have the chance now.

In the text box that appears you should see the contents of the article in an editable form. Simply locate and correct the mistake, before either previewing the update or saving it straight away. Once saved your edit should be displayed immediately. It's as simple as that.

Linking and Starting a New Page
Wikis are based on links. Without them information gets lost in dark corners, which is no use to anyone. Now you know how to edit a page, making a link to another page is very simple. By placing double square-brackets around a word or words you turn it in to a link to the page of that name. For instance to make a link to the Borrowdale page simple write:

Borrowdale

It will end up looking like this: Borrowdale.

To start a new page, simply find a suitable place for a link to it on an existing article, and add the title of your new page in double square brackets. Save the changes, and you should now see a link to your new page with a small question mark next to it. The question mark signifies that the text is a link, but the article doesn't exist yet. Simply click on it, and you'll be given a text box where you can start writing your page. It's rather simple actually!

Newbie Tip: If you want to see how an existing page has been constructed, just click the 'Edit' link to see the source code, and simply copy and paste!

Images
On the whole, images need to be uploaded into the wiki before use. To do this use the "Upload file" link on the lower left-hand menu. The image can then be included in your page using the code: A nicely aligned, captioned and thumbnailed image could use this code: For more details on including images, such as automatic thumbnailing, linking and captioning have a look at this page. You can see what images have already been uploaded using the Special:Imagelist page.

Images from remote sites (including the club gallery) can be inserted into page without uploading them to the wiki first, by simply typing the full URL of the image. However this has many downsides, including no thumbnailing or captioning, so making it far harder to integrate the images into the page neatly. It is therefore recommended to upload the image to the wiki, and help maintain good design standards.

Advanced Editing & Formating
Whilst we've just learnt the very basics in editing the wiki, to improve the format of pages and quality of the information presented in them, there are a number of tools and templates we employ. These include information boxes, grid reference links and maps. They use a uniform layout to help present similar information between different pages. Adding these to articles is simple too, and explained in the Advanced Editing page.