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Lake County Pedia basics
The basics of editing
Use Your Tabs!
If you use a browser with tabs, like Firefox or iCab (most modern browsers have tab capability; you may have to set your preferences to turn on the function), use the tab to help you keep Categories in mind. Click to the Categories page on one tab, and do your work on another tab. After you've written or edited an article, go back to your tab with Categories to check to see which category would fit the page, and put it in. If there is no category, add it to the page, as described above, and the category will be created.
And then go back to your Category tab and refresh the page.
Separate Windows
If you do not have tabs available on your browser, you can do the same with separate windows. Learn your browser and the commands for opening links into separate browser windows and going from one window to another. It is easier if the windows tile (something Mac users are used to; oddly, Windows users may be less used to this technique of tiling windows for easy accessibility). Switching between separate windows or tabs is likely something you will find very helpful while developing any wiki.
Tables
To create a table on LakeCountyPedia.org's wiki, you can easily export from Excel, or create one easily in a text editor.
Basics
All you need to do is prepare your data in rows, with fields separated by tab characters. (Excel's "Save as" → "Text (Tab delimited)" function saves data in this format.) Place the data inside <tab>...</tab> tags, and set any table parameters inside the opening <tab> tag:
<tab class=wikitable> Field 1→Field 2→Field 3 Field 4→Field 5→Field 6 Field 7→Field 8→Field 9 </tab>
(where → represents a tab character) produces the corresponding table.
You can use a different separator, by specifying it as the sep parameter. sep can be one of:
- tab
- a tab
- space
- a space
- spaces
- one or more spaces and/or tabs
- comma
- a comma
- bar
- a vertical bar (|)
You can also specify that either the top row or the left column should be formatted as a heading, using the head parameter, which takes one of these values:
- top
- make the top row a heading
- left
- make the left column a heading
- topleft
- do both
For example:
<tab class=wikitable sep=tab head=top border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"> Head 1,Head 2,Head 3 Field 4,Field 5,Field 6 Field 7,Field 8,Field 9 </tab>
produces a table with a heading row and two data rows, all having three columns.
Starting with Excel
From an Excel table, export using "Delimited with Tabs." Then open the exported document in a text editor, and place the tag "<tab class=wikitable>" (without quotation marks) at the beginning, and the tag "</tab>" (without quote marks) at the end.
What this does is has each tab represent a cell within the table. Therefore if at a later point you'd like to add new information to the table you have a couple of options:
- You'll need to open text editor program, for example Word Notepad, as editing tables with the tab button is currently not an option. This program will allow you to enter the tabs between cells which you can then copy and paste into the existing table.
- Open up an excel spreadsheet and enter the new information that you would like to post in the table. Save it as "Delimited with Tabs." Then open the table in a text editor (Notepad) and copy new information into the existing table on the Ballotpedia page.
Examples
Though other forms of delimiters are possible, I advise tabs. To prepare a tab-delimited table, use a text editor, like OS X's TextEdit (I use BBEdit, the best text editor on any platform) or Windows' Notepad. Below are two examples:
<tab class=wikitable head=top> column 1 column 2 column 3 cell one cell two cell three cell four cell five cell six </tab>
<tab class=wikitable head=left> row 1 cell one cell two cell three row 2 cell four cell five cell six </tab>
References
Many articles include references to articles and books and reports, in the course of a passage of prose. The way to cite on LakeCountyPedia might as well be the way to cite in scholarly articles: with footnotes.
And it is very easy to do. After the passage needing a reference, add this language (without the extra line breaks within the tags, included here only for formatting purposes):
<ref>''[http://books.google.com/books?id=I3mal2inJQgC&dq= lomasky+democracy+and+decision&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots= lsqIY4Moic&sig=lrtppVyjbakW5v_Ky97pEkq6ZIc#PPP1,M1 Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference]'', Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Cambridge University Press, 1995</ref>
and then, at the bottom of the page, add this:
==References== <references />
In this way, a discussion will look like this:
It appears that voters do, for the most part, vote their conscience,
as philosopher Lomasky, and economists Brennan[1] and Caplan[2], have demonstrated.
Templates
Categories
See Help:Using Categories on LakeCountyPedia.
Renaming or Moving Pages
See Help:Renaming (moving) a page.
Ballotpedia Naming Conventions
Please see:
Editing External Link Tags
This is how it should look as ASCII using Media Wiki software:
[http://disclosure.law.ucla.edu/statequery.asp Campaign Disclosure Project]
That's all you need to do.
Reference (footnote) example (see above)
- ↑ Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Cambridge University Press, 1995
- ↑ The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan, Princeton University Press, 2007
