Help:Contents

User Name Choice

When considering your choice of a user name for a new account, please note the "User Listing" link in the navigation menu to the left. Your user name will be public on this listing. Your actual identity will remain private unless you reveal it on your user name home page. Other users will be able to email you without you revealing your email address. Therefore, your user name can be obscure if you so desire. Transparent openness is probably more useful.

Setting User Preferences

You can change many settings from the "my preferences" link, found at the top of each page. You should verify that all the namespaces are checked under the "search" tab on your preferences page. This is also where you set your email notification policy to enable email from other genomewiki users.

Creating new pages

To create a new page, enter the new title for the page into the search box and press the Go button. If a page by that title does not exist, the system will display a page indicating that no such page exists and it will provide a link to enter the editor to create content for the new page.

Alternatively, create a link to a new page from an existing page, using the double bracket notation [[Your New Page|Optional Title For The Link]], and then click on that link. The editor for the new page will be entered directly where you can begin adding the new contents.

Remember to save your page contents after a preview, otherwise you will lose your edits.

CASE SENSITIVITY: The wiki software will enforce case sensitivity on page names after the first letter. The first letter of a page name is case-insensitive and will appear as upper case. Letters following the first are case sensitive and will appear as entered. Therefore, it becomes way too easy to create pages with the exact same name, differing only in case. Beware of this situation.

Discussion Pages

Each article in the wiki has a parallel "discussion" page, accessed via the "discussion" tab at the top of the page. This discussion page is used for note taking and discussion about that page's contents between the contributors to that page. The discussion page can be used in a blog like fashion to maintain a background commentary to the construction process of the actual article page.

Creating links in your pages

For internal links to pages within this wiki

In your page text, enclose the title of the page you want to link to in double square brackets: [[Main Page]], which appears as Main Page. You can also provide an optional title for the link with the "pipe" character: [[Main Page|Optional title here]], which appears as Optional title here.

For external links

In your page text, put the full URL for the link (including "http://") in single square brackets: [http://genome.ucsc.edu], which appears as [1]. You can also provide an optional title for the link by leaving a space after the end of the URL: [http://genome.ucsc.edu UCSC Genome Browser Home], which appears as UCSC Genome Browser Home.

Organizing Content

The primary method of organizing content in this wiki is to place your page into one or more categories. To add your page to a category, place a category tag at the end of your page contents: [[Category:Category name]]

(Technically, you can put a category tag anywhere in the page, but the usual convention is to put it at the end. This makes it easier for others to edit the page itself.)

See Special:Categories for a list of existing categories on this wiki. The name to enter as "Category name" is exactly what appears in the listing.

To create a new category, simply add a page to it — the wiki software will do the rest. Category pages should be edited to have a one line description and placed into an appropriate higher-level category.

Pages can be in more than one category, but you should avoid placing a page in both a category and a subcategory.

To see how Wikipedia handles categorization, please visit Wikipedia categorization.

Entering Math

To display math equations, you can use TeX formatting:

<math> \sqrt{2}\approx 1.4 </math>

See also: Help:Displaying a formula on meta.wikimedia.org

Restricted Pages

We do not have restricted pages here for specific work groups. Everything created here is open content readable by all viewers. And due to the history mechanism behind every page, no content can be effectively deleted entirely.

External Help links

1. 1. MediaWiki: Editing Wiki Pages
   2. MediaWiki: WikiText Markup Examples
   3. MediaWiki: General Help Page
   4. MediaWiki: FAQ
   5. MediaWiki: Placing pages into catagories
   6. WikiPedia: Image link syntax
   7. MediaWiki: Math TeX markup syntax