Help:Writing and Editing for the JFA Wiki
The JFA Wiki offers you a unique opportunity to contribute to the animal rights and vegan movement by lending your writing and research skills, as well as your specialized knowledge to this collaborative site. You also have a chance to grow with us and become a trusted contributor, moderator, or editor, as explained below. We hope you will participate, and can't wait to see your contributions.
Because we are using the Mediawiki software platform—the same platform used by Wikipedia—some of the links on this page will direct you to documentation on the Mediawiki site or the Wikipedia site.
Creating an Account and Your User Page
Before you can edit content, you need to create an account and verify your email address. This will allow you to:
- Edit existing pages and create new draft pages.
- Be eligible for consideration as a contributor, senior contributor, moderator, or editor.
- View a convenient list of all your contributions (edits).
- Use your watchlist to monitor changes made to pages that interest you, and be notified via email when a page you are watching is edited.
- Create your own user page to share information about yourself.
- Exchange emails with other users.
- Use custom preferences to change the look and behavior of the JFA Wiki.
In creating an account, please use a Firstname.Lastname format for your username. For example, Jane.Doe. Your username cannot be changed after an account is created. After you create your account, you will receive an email asking you to verify your email address.
To get started creating your account, do one of the following (while not logged in):
- Click or tap here.
- Select Create Account in the sidebar menu,
- Select Create Account from the dropdown menu on the top right of the screen.
After you create your account and verify your email address, a link to your user page will be shown in the menu on the top-right of the application under your name. The link will be shown in red because the page has not been created. If you wish, click the link and follow the instructions to create the page. You can include information about yourself on the page.
Contributors, Editors, Moderation, and Approval
Due to the nature of the subject matter on this site, we are using a multilevel moderation and approval system which will render vandalism pointless and encourage compliance with our guidelines. As a user, your edits will require moderation (acceptance) before they become part of page history and become visible to other users.
As you make more edits, you have a chance to progress from user to other more trusted levels:
- Contributor: Your edits bypass moderation and show up in page history. They must still be approved to show up in the default view of a page, but your changes are readily viewable by anyone.
- Senior Contributor: Your edits bypass both moderation and approval, but could still be reversed by an editor.
- Moderator: You provide the first level of defense against vandalism, misuse, and other violations.
- Topic Editor: You provide compliance oversight of one subject area, such as environment, health, or ethics.
- Copy Editor: You contribute to the style guides and help enforce compliance with the style guides and other guidelines. A copy editor also edits to improve readability, clarity, fitness for purpose, grammar, and style.
- Managing Editor: The managing editor takes the lead in managing the site and its contributed content.
At any level, all contributions to JFA Wiki may be edited and substantially altered by other users. It's also possible your edits could be reversed.
The following may result in you being blocked from further participation:
- Reversing edits made by editors.
- Consistently submitting content that violates guidelines.
The Editing Process
You should be familiar with both the Content Guidelines and Style Guide before editing content.
The JFA Wiki provides two editing tools that are often found on wiki sites, the source editor and the visual editor. When you are logged in, you can begin editing a page by clicking or tapping on Edit Source for the default editor or Edit for the visual editor, near the top-right of a page, or beside each Section Heading. Depending on your preference settings, one or both buttons may appear.
Source Editor
If you have edited a Wikipedia page you have used the source editor, which is the default editor. When you need to use some type of formatting, such as for new headings or bolding of text, you do this using wiki syntax or the buttons in the edit toolbar above the editing zone. For help with editing see Help Editing. Most of what's on Help Editing applies to the JFA Wiki except for Starting a New Page— see Starting a New Article below for that. For help with formatting, see Mediawiki Help Formatting.
Visual Editor
The Visual Editor provides more of a what you see is what you get editing experience. This editor was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to provide a way of editing that does not require editors to learn wiki markup.
Experienced editors may still prefer editing wikitext because they find it faster and more precise. Even editors who enable Visual Editor will have the wikitext option available from the toolbar for each page and section. The Visual Editor is fairly stable, but it still has some bugs and missing features. Also, the visual editor requires a separate server that periodically may not be available. See the Visual Editor User Guide for help.
Research and Citations
In doing research for an article, the Google Scholar search engine is your friend.
As the Style Guide and Content Guidelines indicate, citations are formatted according to The Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). If you haven't committed this format to memory, we recommend Zotero's online tool to assist. Be sure to choose Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (note) from the dropdown.
Practicing in the Sandbox
If you would like to play around with editing you can create an article in the Sandbox namespace and edit to your heart's content. To create your sandbox page, fill out the text box below, replacing Jane.Doe with your username, then click the button. A page will be created with some boilerplate content to help you get started. You must save the page for it to actually be created.
To get back to the page, use the Sandbox link under Other Namespaces in the sidebar, or search for Sandbox:Page Name on the search field at the top of the page. The page may be deleted if it goes unedited for over a month, but you can always create another one.
Starting a New Draft
Once you decide on the topic and title (see Needed Articles below), create a draft article by typing the title of the article in the text box below and clicking the button. Your page will be created with some boilerplate content to help you get started. If you create a draft and don't follow through with developing the article in a reasonable length of time, the draft will be deleted.
Once the article is completed, email your.friends@justicefornamimals.org to request it be moved out of the draft namespace. Note that articles in the draft namespace are not subject to the same level of moderation of other articles. But editors will still be keeping an eye on your work and may make modifications and suggestions along the way to help you comply with guidelines.
Getting Help
If you need help creating and editing content, please email email us with your questions. Before you do, please carefully read this article, the Content Guidelines and the Help:Style Guide. You will also need to peruse Mediawiki's Help Editing
Articles Needed
