Help:Your first article
Writing your first article could be a great way to share your experiences and perhaps also help some of us other FlightGear users. Hopefully your first wiki article will be only one of many contributions to the FlightGear project.
As you probably already are aware of the FlightGear wiki is a collaborative written documentation related to FlightGear, the free and open source flight simulator. As FlightGear itself the wiki is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 license.
Contributing to the FlightGear Wiki
The FlightGear Wiki is not an encyclopaedia or a search paper. There is no requirement to have primary and secondary sources, unless you are citing something. In fact, much of what is needed does not exist anywhere else at all!
Original research, opinions, and first hand accounts are the majority of the content here, but please do not plagiarize. If you are going to copy or cite something then provide a reference (like you might for a school paper). Other than that, the standards and specific goals of the FlightGear are still in flux and development.
Articles tend to be about whatever someone sees as important, useful, or fun enough to write about!
Typical article disposition
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{{Some messagebox}}
{{Some other messagebox}}
{{Some infobox or navbox}}
[[File:Some image.jpg|thumb|Some caption.]]
[[File:Some other image.jpg|thumb|Some other caption]]
A '''generic article disposition''' would look something like this.
== Heading ==
Some text...
== Related content ==
* [[Some page]]
== External links ==
* [Some link] Some description
{{Some navbox}}
[[en:Some language link]]
[[Category:Some category]]
Editing the wiki markup
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If you have just used Open Office, then it is still easy to get started, as you can begin using the buttons above the edit box to format your text. The wiki markup is rather easy to remember though. A few examples of what can be done is shown below:
* The most common markup is very easy, here also demonstrating unordered and ordered lists: *# ''Italic text'' is done within two apostrophes *# '''Bold text''' is done within three apostrophes *# '''''Bold italic text''''' is done with five apostrophes *#* Thus '''Bold and ''bold italic''''' text can be mixed : Indented text is done with one or more colon at the beginning of each indented paragraph
- The most common markup is very easy, here also demonstrating unordered and ordered lists:
- Italic text is done within two apostrophes
- Bold text is done within three apostrophes
- Bold italic text is done with five apostrophes
- Thus Bold and bold italic text can be mixed
- Indented text is done with one or more colon at the beginning of each indented paragraph
Linking your article to other articles
Linking your article to other articles will make your article more useful to the reader. There is mainly three ways to do this:
- By adding wiki links
- By adding one or more category
- By adding a navbox.
Wikilinks
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Wikilinks are links to other articles. You should preferably not link to other articles in the first section or in section headings and you should only link to other articles the first time a concept is used unless the article is very long. Filling the article with links will not make it easier to read it.
Wikilinks can be used in a few different ways.
Here is some example links: [[Aircraft speed]], [[altitude]]s and [[Modeling - Getting Started#Finding, Creating, or Using Textures|textures]].
Here is some example links: Aircraft speed, altitudes and textures.
Categories
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The categories is connecting the articles, images, and templates in a partly tree-like partly web-like structure. By linking together similar content it will be easier to get a grasp on how your article is related to other articles.
Have a look in the category structure and try find a suitable category or maybe one or two more. Adding a category that is as narrow as possible to your article will help find it for a reader browsing through the categories looking for something.
Categories are added like this [[Category:Some category]] at the very bottom of the page. Sometimes it is desirable to add a category in a way that the article will be sorted differently than by it's name. This can be done like this [[Category:Some category|Sort key]], where the sort key is what it should be sorted as instead of the article name.
Navboxes, or navigation templates, are boxes helping navigating a series of related articles. They come in two flavours, one kind that is found to the top right of the article, often linking together a series of articles on a certain topic, and a kind that is found at the bottom of the article linking together related articles, for example aircraft by the same manufacturer or different articles related to building FlightGear from source files.
More on what to write
The FlightGear wiki has 3,487 articles (although only a few dozen of these are well developed) and only a handful of active contributors, with most days only a dozen or so edits being made.
If you are interested in working or building on what has already been done:
Currently the wiki has three main areas that need to be maintained.
- Portal:Developer related- these are mostly technical articles aimed at people working on FlightGear.
- Help documentation related- on the User side, articles about how to get started, how to use features, FAQ, etc..(like FAQ)
- Official aircraft- keeping the aircraft up to date with those on CVS. (like Table of models)
Also, there are the Stubs, Considered for deletion and Cleanup categories. These articles have been noted as needing more information, a cleanup and/or other additions. Great to start your wiki-career or if you don't like to start a completely new article!
Other interesting pages include things like Real Life Experience, Linux software audio mixing with FlightGear, Current events, or Presentation Recipe!
Well that sounds exciting! Good luck!
Creating a new article
Fill your new articles name in the search box and press Go. If the article doesn't exist yet, you can click the red link in the sentence that appears like:
- Create the page Title of your article on this wiki!.