User:Ldrew/Sandbox7

New Users - Contributing To The Wiki For the First Time

When any wiki user first thought about adding information to a wiki page or creating a new one, they paused wondering "How Do I Do This Without Messing Up?" Fortunately, editing a wiki page is easy for almost everyone because the wiki uses a editor that is like those we are used to in word processing programs.

If you have any very basic questions about logging in and seeing the editor for the first time, read the "Share Your Knowledge By Adding To The Wiki" article and watch the video in the link at the bottom of the page.

Add a link to an existing wiki article
Let's add something to an existing wiki article so you can see how it is done.

While looking at the Calaveras County, California article, you notice that a very useful genealogy link is not present under the "Migration" section

screen cap - example_Ediing_A_Section

The California Pioneer Project website isn't mentioned in that section and you know it is full of great information for researchers. To add the link to the Project to that section of the wiki article, you'd follow these simple steps:

1. Login to the wiki 2. Click on the little edit icon box to the right of the Migration heading 3. Click to add a new line. 4. Click on the bullet list in the editor 5. Add the text name of the site 6. Highlight the site name 7. Click on the bold icon in the editor 7. Repeat the highlighting and click on the link icon in the editor 8. Add the address (URL) of the California Pioneer Project

&lt;nowiki&gt;http://www.cagenweb.com/cpl/&lt;/nowiki&gt; screen cap - example_Link Added

9. Add a comment at the bottom of the page in the Summary field. "Added a link to the California Pioneer Project" 10. Click "Save"

screen cap - example_Summary Example

Congratulations! You just made your first contribution to the wiki if you followed these steps in a wiki article about a topic of which you are knowledgeable.

That was easy! As you can see it was very much like editing or adding to a document using word processing software.

Now that you know how to add information to the wiki, patrol wiki articles that are of interest to you. If they are missing information that would benefit the family history community, add your knowledge to the article. The magic of the wiki comes from the user community who add their knowledge to it for the benefit of everyone.

Go to the Beginning Contributor tasks article to read about more ways you can contribute to the wiki. Follow the links on it to learn about the wiki style guide and other useful topics.

You'll soon be creating full pages on the wiki, but don't forget to share the knowledge and links you've discovered in your own research. Add that them to existing wiki articles that cover the same topic, location or resource links.