Help:Joining the Discussion

Joining the discussion

Because a wiki is collaboratively edited, wiki software is specially designed to facilitate discussions. Though after reading the previous sections you should have enough knowledge to add and edit content, the synergistic nature of a wiki really starts coming out when you work with other people to improve the site. Therefore, the rest of this guide is focused on utilizing tools to collaborate with others.

Adding edit summary[[Image:Edit summary.png|thumb|right|200px]]
As you will see in the screen shot to the right, there are several features located below the main editing text box. The first of these are a text box labeled "Summary." Please always type a summary of the edits, and this information will appear in the change log. Also you can mark a change as a minor edit. It is important to write a brief description of your edit so that everyone can easily see what your aim was in making the edit.

Watching for changes
There are several methods for watching for changes in the wiki. These tools include your watch list, viewing the document history, and viewing the global change history.

[[Image:My watchlist.png|thumb|left|200px]] Watch list
Your watch list gives you the ability to watch pages of interest for changes. When editing a page, check the box labeled "Watch this page" below the edit summary. If you are not editing the article, click the button titled "watch" at the very top of the page.

To view your watch list, click "my watchlist" near the top-right corner of the page. On this page, a summary of each edit is listed, in chronological order. There is a lot of information included for each edit event, including:


 * A link titled "diff" which will take you to an overview of the differenced between the current version and the previous one.
 * A link titled "hist" which will take you to the complete edit history for that page.
 * A link to the pages that has been edited.
 * The name of the user who made the edit, which is a link to their user page.
 * A link to the talk page corresponding to that user's page.
 * A link to a list of contributions made by that user.

Document history
Each article has a history page (link located at the top of the page), which shows a chronological list of changes to that document, with all of the same information that is shown in the watch list. To see the difference between two revisions, just select both of them from the list, and click the button titled "Compare selected versions."

Recent changes (global)[[Image:Global changes.png|thumb|right|200px]]
A great way to keep track of what has been going on throughout the site is with the "Recent changes" link, located in the navigation bar to the left. This page will show you all of the same information that can be found in your watch list or page history, but with a site-global scope.



Watching via RSS
RSS is a great way to keep track of new content added to your favorite blogs, websites, and wikis. If you use RSS, you can add the recent changes page to your feed reader. A description of how to use RSS is beyond the scope of this article, but if you would like to read more on the topic here.

Discussion section [[Image:Talk page.png|thumb|right|200px]]
As with the history section, each page also has a "discussion" section, commonly referred to as the talk page. This page works just like any other page in the wiki, but with the purpose of discussing changes to the associated article. Just as with other pages, the talk page also has a page history.

Always be polite in discussions but feel free to state your opinion and defend your opinion strongly. It is important to also sign your comment so we all know who said what, when. You can sign your comment by typing --~

Discussion pages should never be deleted as they are a record of how an article got to where it is today. Sometimes the process is as important as the decision. If you want to start a new subject then start a level 2 heading (e.g. ==New Subject== )