From Helpful

Be aware - as a reader too - that many articles here are in the data collection phase, awaiting a culling phase. You should not be afraid to add things.

Note that something I don't want is muddied, correct,-but-all-in-the-implications pages like wikipedia is good at. Articles here should clear up regular confusion, be made of bite size chunks, be easily readable and skimmable, useful to most.

It should not be too verbose-'n'-verbatim, not widely known or used - unless you're writing a beginners's guide to something no 'professionals' get bothered to dumb down to how simple it really is.

Feel free to add things but remember that other people may restructure your pages - which is in fact encouraged when (and only really when) it's a noticable improvement.

If you add facts that clearly or probably originate in 'well, it works for me' to stay if there is simpler encompassing reason -- but to editors: do leave information like "In practice this usually boils down to ...". Qualifiers can be really instructive like that. Yes, please remove or rewrite anything that is misleading.

Most anything goes on stub pages; just add the marker template.

In general, put things you base conclusions on in the talk page. That goes doubly for things that could be argued/explained a few ways. This way other people know what they can and can't edit and what they do and don't need to research to do so.

These pages should be flexible and not get stuck in ruts created by earlier contributers, if it all possible. People enforcing private views will be frowned on. Think wikipedia policies, I suppose, but with a little less "it has to be official" sense.

But don't take any of that as discouragement. We likeses information!

Volatility

Also, this being my server and me not wanting legal muck (and having some idea of the shape of things I want in here, in the usefulness sense already described), I retain veto right on removing pages and content. I'll probably not be bashful about revising anyhow as from what I've seen of less official wikis it's not a bad idea to have a moderator and even consistency and even style nazi of sorts - better than none, anyhow.

Convention (and minor style)

Minimize clutter. Do not make everything that can possibly be a wikilink a wikilink - people are not too dumb to understand searching, only wikilink to pages that are directly relevant.

Don't use verbatim sections too much, as they break up the page. For small bits of code, use the inlinecode template, and use it only for things that need highlighting - to subtle mark the keyword-ness of things, use <tt>. (I should keep to these two more myself, in fact).

It's nice to add interesting sources and relevant pages under a 'See also' section. Try to title them with the page titles, so that one has a change of finding pages that move over time rather than just having a 404 to go on.

Splitting a page into a 'In short' (a summary of implications), 'For the interested' (the general structure) and 'For the nitpickers' (details, details) type sections may also be nice.

If you can, add links to pages that contain (sometimes much) more information that is related but not necesarily useful to most. (Example: list screen's commonly used key shortcuts/command and link to the full manual)

Adding a few links to closely related wiki articles (that are more explanatory than the 'basically...' one) can be quite useful.

Templates

Currently there are:

• {{comment}} is coloring for now
• {{inlinecode}} is inline highlighted teletype

• {{stub}}
• {{unfinished}}
• {{feelfree}} is unfinished with a "I'm not sure of more than this" twist

• {{verify}} puts a bracketed 'verify me'. You can search for these if you want to work on things.

Special characters

Some characters are treated by the wikiparser. You could use numeric entities to get them to print from within template arguments, primarily

• &#x7B;
  for
  {
• &#x7C;
  for
  |
• &#x7D;
  for
  }
• &#x3D;
  for
  =

... it is probably simpler to use nowiki to temporarily disable all wiki-specific parsing:

{{comment|<nowiki>a template is made like {{this|args}}</nowiki>}} 

Comments

Maybe I should add a question and answered-question template as well so there's a way to check for new questions to be answered, but that may lead this to become an entirely unstructured FAQ. Still, it may be useful for the talk pages.

Code

Note that the almost-verbatim one-space-indented wiki blocks can be made verbatim, no-extra-indentation-necessary by putting a <nowiki> around the contents, like (click edit to see the markup):

def yay():
  for i in range(10):
    print "thing %d"%i

As long as GeSHi is installed, you can also get it syntax-highlighted. Wrap the code in <code lang="python">, </code>, or whatever the language is:

def yay():
  for i in range(10):
    print "thing %d"%i

Marked pages

Feel like polishing?

Whenever you dump in a few links and sentences in preparation, use {{stub}}.

• Stub pages, to paraphrase wikipedia, are articles which have not received real attention from the editors. They have usually been created to posit a few essential or random lines or links as a first step towards a real article, and will probably become a useful article in the future.

Whenever you started an article but haven't finished it, use {{unfinished}}. {{feelfree}} is a variation for when you want to encourage collaboration.

• Unfinished pages
• Feelfree pages

Whenever you're not entirely sure of something you say or even someone else says, put {{verify}} there in the line. It'll add a grey (verify me) there in the article and show up on the following page:

• Verify-me jots. You are encouraged to use these when you figure you or someone else should double-check this later.

(Maybe there should be an invisible variation of this too.)

See also

• MediaWiki_User's_Guide:_Using_tables