User talk:Callahanp
The following is a response by Johan G to a wiki mail I sent to him personally with questions about how to properly organize wiki pages and a solicitation of comments on the style of writing in Howto:Build your own Panel or Cockpit and Howto:C172P Panel Project. Johan's comments include references to several useful articles on wiki style and structure including the use of sub-categories instead of categorizing in the title.
His comments also cover the use of templates including {{delete}} and {{WIP}}
Cleanup, subpages, lack of feedback etc.
Hi there, I saw your wiki mail. I am only sort of active in the community at the moment, more due to IRL reasons than my interest in FlightGear (though I am still actually hardly ever flying in FlightGear).
This got a bit longer than I first planned and to a large extent reflects my opinion, but I hope you will find it useful anyway.
| Tip The main aim is to make it easy for the reader to navigate, read and comprehend the material. |
Regarding templates, skim through Help:Templates, look at templates similar to what you want to achieve and start small. The other help pages may be helpful too, but maybe more in general.
As for lack of feedback, I do not think you should see that as a bad sign.
Style
When it comes to style, there is a somewhat hidden away Manual of style, but see my tip.
However in general finding, navigating, reading and comprehending is made easier by
- good first sections that summarizes articles well,
- good article, section and subsection titles,
- balanced article, section, subsection and paragraph lengths, and
- a decent navigation box on the right.
Illustrations will help as well (with good captions they may even aid finding the article).
The first section also serves the two purposes of giving an early indication to whether one has landed on the right page or not, and can also help the reader get a quick overview that will help him comprehend the article easier. It should however be at least somewhat concise, one or maybe a few short paragraphs.
The best thing with making articles easier to navigate, read and comprehend for the reader is that they will also most likely get better page rankings.
Subpages or not
Personally I most often use subpages to put drafts, to do lists etc. as subpages to my user page.
While the article series could be organized into subpages, consider if they need quite that long a title and if they can stand somewhat on their own. You can perhaps instead group them in a category (probably as a subcategory to Category:Cockpit building) and with a custom navbox template in each article (see Category:Navigation templates for inspiration). I think that a navbox on the top right will help navigation more than subpages.
Moving and deleting pages and other wiki maintenance
While one need to be at least an administrator to delete pages, anyone can move them (in essence rename them), unless they are protected. It is not all that obvious at first, but if you are at a computer you can either see a Move or a More tab among the page tabs on top of a page. From there on it should be explained in the form where you enter a new name for the page.
If you instead want a page deleted mark the page with the {{delete}} template. It may take a while till the page is deleted.
One important thing when moving a page is to consider the pages that might link to it. In order to help a reader to find what he is looking for you might need to edit the pages linking to the page to be moved. To see what pages that are affected, click the What links here link on the sidebar to the left.
You could optionally add the {{WIP}} template to the top of the pages while you put most of your effort on them and they might change often.
Preview early and preview often
Finally, preview early and preview often and save when mostly done (preferably with a short and concise summary).
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 16:17, 5 November 2017 (EST)
talk:Callahanp/Flightgear Codebase
About creating new pages
Hi! Saw your message on the unofficial FlightGear Discord server.
This might be of help: Help:Your first article#Creating a new article. Not quite as relevant, but possibly of help: Help:Namespaces.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 20:42, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
External links
Hi,
Maybe it was intentional, but I am not sure if you understand how external links work on the wiki. For example, I found this piece of code on User:Callahanp:
[[/www.reddit.com/user/Ujjawal-Gupta/|Ujjawal-Gupta]]This creates a (broken) internal wiki link: Ujjawal-Gupta
I think what you were trying to do is:
[http://www.reddit.com/user/Ujjawal-Gupta/ Ujjawal-Gupta]Which results in: Ujjawal-Gupta
Please see the manual for more help: Help:Formatting#Links to external sites. Don't hesitate to ask if something is unclear.
Cheers,
Gijs (talk) 08:37, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Gijs,
Thanks for the info, and yes, I'm aware of the difference, it was just a bad bit of editing. I'm sure this popped up during an automated scan of wiki errors. I'd be very surprised if anyone actually looked at the page, let alone tried the link. That section was copy pasta from a post I made on reddit. I had meant to remove the link entirely, as it did not apply here, and was formatted improperly anyway.
-pat