Using this wiki

A wiki is a website designed to be edited by its readers, usually using simple codes to provide formatting and linkage. It's collaborative, shared information. There are many wikis out there; this one is focused on urban plant foraging and uses the same basic wiki engine (called Mediawiki) as Wikipedia, which is probably the most widely known and referenced wiki out there today.

We operate on the premise that anyone visiting this wiki probably has useful knowledge that could become part of the community pool. Here are some tips on using this wiki. More detailed information about using the mediawiki software can be found on the mediawiki site.

1 Searching
2 Useful special pages
3 Making an account
4 Adding a page
- 4.1 Sprouts/stubs
- 4.2 Using a template
  - 4.2.1 Commonly used regular templates:
  - 4.2.2 Commonly used substitution templates:
5 Basic editing
- 5.1 Adding images
6 Making the connective material
- 6.1 When to link
- 6.2 Categories

Searching

Looking for information? Want to add a page? In both of these situations, searching the wiki is a recommended first step. The search form is at the top of every page.

If there is a page with a title matching what you type, you will be sent right to that page. If there isn't, you'll get search results in two sections: pages that have partial matches in the title, and pages that have your search term or parts of it in the text of the page. You'll also get the option to "Create this page".

Useful special pages

There are some pages on the wiki that are special, automatically generated instead of made by hand. Here are a sampling of the useful ones:

Recent changes will show you what people have been working on on the wiki. Maybe that'll point you to an interesting new project (ooh, someone's posting all about fermentation!) or an interesting something in season. Or maybe it'll just add the human touch of fingerprints to your Internet experience.
Wanted pages is a list of pages that are linked to, but don't exist yet. The more links, the more wanted the page is.
Categories lists categories of content on the wiki. You might want to familiarize yourself with the categories we use for your editing, or just use it as a jumping-off point for your exploration.
Random page ranks as the "most 'useful' page for 3:30 am". If you just want to see where chance or synchronicity will bring you.
Upload file is the page where you can upload things like photos for including in pages. See Images, further down this page.

You can find these links on the front page, and these and more on the Special pages page.

Making an account

You can edit this wiki without having an account. This is not always the case; some wikis require you to have an account to edit them. There are a few benefits to having an account.

you have your own personal user page to use as a sandbox for experimenting with wiki features
you can look at the list of your contributions
you can compile a list of pages you want notification about when they are changed
you can set up your user page so that other logged-in users can contact you by email -- without giving out your email
there's more of a sense of community if the gardeners have names, and you can recognize the tracks of someone's passing.

Adding a page

If you click on a red link, suddenly you are in the content creator zone. Typing into that big empty box and clicking "Save page" will make you a wiki author.

Remember a few things when writing:

A wiki is world-edited. If you are desperately attached to your prose, be warned that you may visit one day and find that it's been modified. That's how wikis work.
This wiki is licensed Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 under the Creative Commons. That means that things put on this wiki, including writing and images, are available for people to use for non-commercial purposes.
Be sure that text and images are ok for you to use. There's a wide world of images and text that are in the creative commons or otherwise in the public domain -- but don't assume it is just because it's on the Internet. Quoting text, if the quotes are not too extensive and are part of a larger piece, is generally considered fair use.
Please try to make your text as accessible as possible, by which i mean: if you use specialized botany terms or latin names, link them or explain them for those who don't know them.

Sprouts/stubs

If you don't have a lot of information, you can still contribute by creating a placeholder page called a stub (or on this wiki, a sprout). This page should be as nice as you can make it given the information and skills you have -- but don't worry about making it exhaustive. Some wiki gardener may come along later and help it grow. Be sure to include the text {{stub}} at the top of the page so it'll be listed in the Stub category -- sort of a tasklist for wiki tenders. If you come on a page that seems woefully incomplete but lacks the stub tag, it's only the work of a minute to add it, and the wiki will be better for your care.

Using a template

A template is a piece of a wiki page that can be included in the page you're writing. They can be used in one of two ways. When used the regular way, the contents of the template display on the page. The template can be used in a number of different pages, and can be changed in all of those places by changing the template page itself. For example, if you wanted to include a list of umbelliferous plants on multiple pages, you could make a template for that (create the link by typing {{umbellifers}} -- until is it created, it will show up as a red link reading Template:umbellifers). Once the template with the list is created, it can be easily included on each page. Then when someone adds Queen anne's lace to the template, all of those pages will be automatically updated with the current information.

Some of these templates are just messages that we might want to include on multiple pages, like the {{stub}} (aka "sprout") message, which marks the page as needing work and adds it to the category stubs. Others, like the {{idwarning}} template, take inputs (variables) that change the way they display. See the template page for more information on the potential inputs for each one.

Commonly used regular templates:

{{stub}} - used to indicate that a page has very minimal information and needs attention.
{{idwarning}} - used to indicate that a plant has lookalikes, which may be dangerous.

The second way to use a template is through substitution (mediawiki also calls it "transclusion" -- there's a nice 25 cent word). If you type {{subst:TemplateName}}, the content of the template at the moment you save the page you're editing will be copied into your page. If you make changes to the text after that, they will not be copied to the template, nor will later changes to the template be reflected in the page you were editing. It's like a quick and easy way to copy and paste.

Commonly used substitution templates:

{{plant}} - used to set up a new plant page, with headings etc. Can also be added to a plant page that was set up without it, to make the page more consistent

Basic editing

The idea behind a wiki is that you can make a web page quickly, without having to worry about a lot of technical stuff about servers and styles and the like. Once you're editing a page (this includes starting a new one), you can just type and save. To make it prettier (and perhaps easier to read, you might want to use "markup", which formats the page and adds links and things. See Help: Basic markup.

Adding images

Images are incredibly useful in plant identification, and they're not hard to add to pages. You can do it one of two ways: make the image link in the page before uploading, and it will make an upload link for you (the {{plant}} template does this). Or use the Upload file page to upload an image, and then create the link. We recommend the former, it takes less remembering.

If the photos are not your own, please be sure you can use them. As noted above, lots of images are in the public domain or the Creative Commons -- but don't assume it is just because it's on the Internet. It's always a good idea (and required, if "Attribution" is part of their license) to add credits and link to the source in the image page. Be sure to also describe what the image is!

For more information about the technical aspects of image links, see mediawiki help on images.

Making the connective material

Information, especially information about the natural world, is not discrete tidbits; it's connected in lots of different ways. There are some wiki tools that allow us to join up the pages we make to mimic that natural interconnectedness.

When to link

When you're writing or editing a page, adding links can make that page much clearer. For example, if a book described a plant's leaves as obovate but didn't provide an illustration, it might not be very helpful. In a wiki, "obovate" could be a link to the Identification Key that has a diagram of leaf shapes. Apart from botanical terms, you may want to link the names of techniques or the names of plants where they appear in other plants' descriptions or in recipes.

If a page doesn't exist: say you want to warn people that wild carrot can look like poison hemlock, but no one has yet written up a page for hemlock. Make the link anyway! Someone may come along who's just an expert on poison hemlock (don't ask them why!). There's a list of Special:WantedPages that shows which nonexistent pages are linked to most, so if you're looking to be a wiki angel and let the community guide your research, that page can show you what the wiki wants.

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