Help:Guidelines for Editors
Becoming an Editor
To be a GAMEO editor, you need to be a registered user with a Login Name and a Password. These are initiated by GAMEO Managing Editor Richard Thiessen, Librarian at Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, British Columbia, or Associate Managing Editor Sam Steiner, former Librarian & Archivist at Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ontario.
If you have been invited to serve as an editor, one of the managing editors will send you an email with your Login Name (which will be a combination of your first and last name) and a temporary password. After you log in for the first time, you should change your password to one of your choice. It should be at least ten characters long. We recommend that it be a combination of letters and numbers, and possibly even including a special character like a #, % or some such.
User Information and Preferences
User Page
When you login you will see your name on the righthand side near the top. Clicking on this link will bring you to your personal User Page. Here you can provide information about yourself, and upload a photo if you wish.
Talk Page
Immediately to the right of your name is a link to a "Talk" page. If you create this page, it is a place to communicate with other editors about things related to GAMEO, (or not, if you wish.)
Preferences
You should spend some time in the Preferences link.
User Profile - Here you see your user name and id number, as well as statistics about what you've done. Provide a Real Name and sure your email address is correct. Change your password if you've only had a temporary one.
Appearance - Accept the defaults, except to change image size limit to 1024x768px and thumbnail size to 300px.
Date and Time - This is up to your preference.
Editing - Accept the defaults until you are familiar enough with using MediaWiki to make changes. Please do not use external editors.
Recent Changes - This your preference, but you should probably start with default settings.
Watchlist, Search, Misc and Semantic MediaWiki - Start with the defaults; change when you have a reason to do so.
Available Help Pages
Help Pages That Are Available Include:
Guidelines for Editors – Guidelines for basic creation and editing of GAMEO articles. (This Help Page.)
Guidelines for Reviewers – Guidelines for reviewers to "publish" or "reject" articles, to add images, maps or other multi-media to articles.
GAMEO Style Sheet – This tells you how we do things, e.g. spell out numbers under 10, then use numerals; style to use in bibliographic entries, etc. Although it’s boring reading, you need to be familiar with this, or a Reviewer may send an article back to you for correction.
Common Abbreviations – These are bibliographical sources frequently used in articles in the print Encyclopedia, as well as newer forms. You can use this information to “cut and paste” into your bibliography on occasion, especially if you’re helping to enter articles from volumes 1-5.
Article Guides
There are a variety of article guides to consult when you’re writing a new article or extensively revising a current article.
Writing a New Article
Input text
To write a new article:
In the search field at top right fill in a “Title” in the approved form of entry, e.g. Darmstadt (Hesse, Germany); Derksen, John (1929-2010); Abbotsford (British Columbia, Canada), etc. The search should reveal there is no article by that name. It will offer for you to "Create the page "Your Title" on this wiki. When you click on this it will up a page creating the title you typed. Select a template for the type of article (generic/church/person/place) and load the template. This loads the appropriate structure for your article.
In the blank text field then either type in the new content or paste it from your Word, or other word processing program. The toolbar above this form shows various editing features you can use, not unlike your word processor. A few may not be obvious – the “chain link” is for links to other GAMEO articles (you’ll use this a lot) or to external links (most often used in "Additional Information" to a church's website, etc. The “table” is to create tables. If you do need to create a table, use the defaults. The "picture" is for inserting illustrations. Remember the defaults for illustration.
Links
You probably have a number of proper names, institutional names or geographic locations in your article. We encourage you to create links to other GAMEO articles as much as possible. There are three ways to do this. Highlight the name or term you want to create a link from, e.g. “Palatinate” and click on the “chain link”. This brings up a search box. Fill in the term (perhaps you’ve copied it your clipboard and can paste it in). Hit the “Enter” key to start the search. Plone will give a list of terms that match the search. Look for the article that you want to link to – it may be somewhat further down the list, or the search may tell you that it found nothing. Click the term (the full title of the article will show up beneath the search box) and click OK if this is the desired article. The term is now a greenish color and is underlined. Follow the same procedure for any other links you want to create. (remove any paretheses in your term, or you will get an error message. The search box does accept letters with diacritics) Sometimes a term is very common, e.g. Pennsylvania, Palatinate, Menno Simons, Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. You can also open another session of GAMEO and open “Common Links” (listed on the Tools page). This is a page of links to commonly used terms – mostly geographic places and institutions. You can then copy the appropriate link and paste over your term in the article. If necessary you can modify the spelling to match the way the term was used in your article. Alternatively, if the search result is too long, or the term includes a diacritic, open GAMEO in another browser session. If the results of your search in option 1 are too long, go to the encyclopedia and browse to find the article I am looking for. Once located it, simply note the file name, go back to option 1, and search for the file name instead of the article name. That is especially helpful when looking for articles with diacritics.
If you wish to insert an illustration into text (an illustration already in the database, or that has been uploaded by a managing editor), go the paragraph where the illustration is to be placed. Click on the table box. Indicate there will be two rows and one column in the table. Uncheck the box for "Create Heading." Then click "Add table." This will create an empty table above the paragraph where you wish the illustration. With the cursor in the top cell of the table, click on the "tree" to find an image. The search box will in the images folder -- search for the image, you can use the file name of the image if you know it. When you select the right image, it will give you a choice on the size of the image to be displayed in the picture. Our default is the "mini" 200 x 200 pixels. In the bottom cell of the table place the caption for the illustration. This usually also includes the source of the image. Highlight the caption, click on the dropdown edit box and select the style "Image subtext." This creates italicized in a slightly smaller font. Now click on the image that is in the top cell and click on the "chain" to create a link to the full size of the image. You should be able to search again for the image. Now you need to decide whether you want the image table to be on the left or on the right. Click on "htlm" and look for the line that reads "
". It should contain your caption and other html code. Now insert align="left" or align="right" just before the last angle, i.e.