Book wiki

[telophase]

I made a suggestion to one of the mods over at whatwasthatbook to use a wiki instead of a FAQ for frequently-requested books, because users can drop keywords into the search box and it'll search the text and bring up all pages that contain those keywords, which is easier than reading through a FAQ. She's interested in seeing if that can work, so I set up a wiki at http://whatwasthatbook.magatsu.net/.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go to the wiki and add some books, authors, and genres so I can see what needs to be tweaked, clarified, added, removed, etc. :) There's only two books in it right now (one mine, one I ripped off from rachelmanija's post on the community), and there need to be mroe to really show off the search functions.

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Uh, I created an account and added three titles but I'm not sure how to add categories to those entries. Help?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

You can always click 'Edit' on pages in the wiki and see how it's done. :)

OR:

----


[[Category:Stevenson, D. E.]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Pastoral Literature]]
[[Category:Novel]]
[[Category:Title]]

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Thanks (and for correcting spelling).

[marith.livejournal.com]

Do you want real entries suitable for final inclusion in the wiki, or just test data that can be wiped out?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think real. If you want to put test stuff in, mark it an obnoxious TEST or something so I can find it easily. :)

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Joined. I read a fair amount of books as a child so I hope I can put together something decent.
However I have never touched anything with wiki before and was confused about the categories as well. I'm sure I'll figure it out though. For us n00bs though, would it be possible to edit the test page to look like an example of the final product so we can see it without accidently messing anything up?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you click 'edit' on any page in there, you can see what it looks like, then just hit back arrow in your browser to exit without changing.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. I thought of doing that but didn't want to accidentally delete anything you just did. I'm sure if I play around with it for a few minutes I'll feel more confident about it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The good thing aobut a wiki is you cannot accidentally delete! :D Even if you make a change and save it, you can go into the History, call up the previous version, and save it to make it the current version. :D

So no need to worry. :)

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Really? That's pretty cool. (I'm glad to know I won't mess anything up.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. :) And if you get confused and mess anything up and can't figure out how to un-mess it, then you can drop a note into the User_talk:WikiSysop (http://whatwasthatbook.magatsu.net/index.php?title=User_talk:WikiSysop&action=edit) page telling me what page is messed up, and I'll go fix it. :)

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

It says that page doesn't exist yet so you get my annoying questions here. I've read through the FAQ and I understand most of the coding. I assume to make a new page you want to go to the author/titles page add your person and click on the red link, then create/edit the page, correct? I have looked at the coding for the other entries so I can stay in a similar style, however when I click on the authors/titles page all I can see is "This category lists all the works in the wiki by title." Am I doing something horribly wrong?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The page won't exist until someone asks a question there. :) That's how pages get added. :)

And to add a page, there's several ways, but the easiest is to type the name of the page into the search box to the left, and click "Go". If there's a page of that name alreayd, it'll take you there, but if there isn't, at the top of the search results page you'll be offered to opportunity to create it - the name of the page you typed in will be a link in red. You click on that and you'll get a page with an editing box where you can start typing stuff in.

Wikis are very confusing at first, but after playing about a bit, it comes clear.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Oh, It auto adds the title to the page! That makes much more sense now. I guess I was trying to put the cart before the horse. I think I got it now, thanks.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hee. :D Yeah, it's confusing until you get the logic of it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm about to delete the "Literature" category, because it's confusing. I'm going to make that "General Fiction" which refers to, as the Literature page said, books that do not fit into any genres like fantasy, sf, horror, etc.

Also - when you update a page, it really, really helps if you put a quick description of what you did into the "Summary" box at the bottom. To see what this does, go to the Recent Changes page (http://whatwasthatbook.magatsu.net/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges) - the summary shows up there and lets those of us who are keeping an eye on changes what happened. :)

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Ok. I wont use that anymore. I just copied one of the earliest entries and made a template, so I'll fix it before I add anything else. I haven't updated anything yet other then to italicise some of my text, and when I remembered to write why I updated it, it seemed silly to update again to say, italicized some text I should have had italicized in the first place.
Just let me know if I am doing anything wrong, and I'll make sure not to do it again. Thank you for being so patient, I know some people would have told me to sit down and stop trying by now.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hee. :) It's especially confusing now, because I'm changing the style guide as I think of better ways to do things, so something that was perfectly OK two hours ago isn't good now. XD "Genreal Fiction" is a much better description than "Literature", anyway, and I changed things like "Young Adult Literature" to "Young Adult" because it works better.

And thank you for all your work so far - I'm not about to tell you to sit down and shut up when you're adding so much content. :D You -and anyone else reading this who wants to contribute - might want to click the "watch" tab on the style guide to attempt to keep up with my massive changes. XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The current thing I'm pondering on and ahven't come to any good idea about is what to do about series. I really like your idea (I think it was you) of adding (Series) after the title when it's not clear it's a series (The Darkangel Trilogy is obviously a series).

I'm trying to decide if we should have separate entries for each of the books, too, or just list them all on the series title page... :/ Hrm.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I would say leave them all listed on a series page, treated like an omnibus, but if someone wants to go and add a page for the individula book let them. I can't remember enough about some of those series to write in indepth thing for each book, but someone else may only remember a certain book out of the series, especially if it is a series that has books that are more individual, like the books in the Earthsea cycle. Additionally I don't think you would want to fit something like summaries of Harry Potter 1-6 on one page:P
I noticed after I started that I read a lot of series growing up.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Sounds good - I think that if someone lists a book separately, jsut to make sure they link it to the series page, and link the series page to the individual book.

Things like the Animorphs or Nancy Drew books are going to be awkward no matter what we do, since there's so many books in the series.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Ugh I know. I noticed as I was typing it. Wait I have to mention andalites, and yeerks, and Hork-Bajir, tehnically there should be even more species. That is the same reason I am putting off doing the Bruce Coville My Teacher is an alien/flunked the planet etc.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :D If we decide to later, we can make subpages that spin off the main pages, but for now jsut keeping astrict control of format and using the formatting that makes those nifty automagic tables of contents should help a great deal.