Difference between revisions of "LifeWiki:Editor pages"

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Revision as of 20:22, 22 August 2012

Welcome to LifeWiki! This is a site devoted to cataloguing everything about Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata. LifeWiki (as its name suggests) is a wiki, much like Wikipedia (though not not exactly like Wikipedia). This means that the entire site is a collaborative effort, to which anybody may contribute; just create an account and then click "edit" at the top of any page contribute to that page. Changes and additions are always welcome, whether you are adding new patterns to the site or just correcting a typo.

Help pages

If you have never edited a wiki before, you will find our help pages to be very useful as you get the hang of things. The help pages introduce you to the editing procedure, proper wiki markup, and other similar topics.

  • Categories - how to create and use categories effectively
  • Editing - a step-by-step guide to making a simple edit to a page
  • Formatting - a description of how to produce proper spacing, emphasis, and so on within articles
  • Images - how to create and upload images that match the formats used within the wiki
  • Links - how to connect wiki pages with each other and the outside web
  • Quick editing guide - a brief introduction to editing that goes over the most-used features and commands
  • Tables - for organizing data in rows and columns
  • Templates - useful for creating several articles (or sections of articles) that follow a similar format

Policies and guidelines

Main article: Policies and guidelines

Because there is no official structure that polices the quality of our site, we have had to adopt various rules, procedures, and values that allow everyone to make effective contributions to the wiki. New editors on the site are not required to read through all of these policies and guidelines; they are not a list of rules that must be understood before participating in the site. Most of them are based upon common sense. Editors who act in good faith and treat other members of the community with good faith are unlikely to encounter any problems; editors will be notified if a situation arises where a policy or guideline may be relevant.

  • Deletion policy - how and why to request deletion of a page
  • LifeWiki is not Wikipedia - even though LifeWiki is similar in style to Wikipedia, there are important differences
  • Notability - what patterns and topics warrant their own page in LifeWiki
  • Pattern pages - because the majority of the wiki is made up of pages about particular patterns, there are plenty of guidelines in place to ensure that they are high-quality and of consistent format
  • Protection policy - what pages are protected from anonymous or non-administrative edits, and why
  • Style guide - language use, proper capitalization, when and how to use emphasis, and so on

Contributing

These are many simple ways in which users can help improve LifeWiki, many of which do not require much knowledge of cellular automata.

  • Helping out - general ideas for improving the quality of the site
  • Task list - specific tasks that editors have requested be taken care of

There are several pages available to editors to help them find useful tools and categories quickly.

  • Editor categories - a list of categories and special pages that keep track of articles that need work
  • Sandbox - an area where users can experiment with wiki markup to their heart's content
  • Template list - a description of templates that are heavily-used throughout the site