Cpshockley – User talk

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Revision as of 03:56, 25 June 2014 by Fred Gandt (talk | contribs) (A few friendly pointers about editing/creating pages.)
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Hi. I couldn't help but notice you made a lot of individual edits during the creation of USAF Mod and USAF Mod/Aircraft, since Special:RecentChanges shows all of them in a big block ;-)

Two things you may not know about [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Help MediaWiki] (the software this wiki is built with):

  • Editing sessions can last several hours (in fact days if you poke the browser with a sharp stick) which allows us to leave the window open whilst we do other things, and then come back to it later.
    • We can run several tabs at the same time as well, so you can upload in one tab, and add the results in another.
  • Next to the "Save" button, there's a "Preview" button which will show what the page would look like if we saved it in it's current form. This allows us to check our work for errors and layout concerns, without (most of the time (certain pages such as Templates require special treatment)) saving the page, and then reopening a new edit to tweak it.

Multiple edits of a similar nature to the same page in a short period of time tend to act as a big block of spam in the RecentChanges list (useful to keep track of what work is being done on the wiki) and make for a large block of not very useful page history (useful for keeping track of how a page developed).

Which brings me to another point (boring I know, but kinda helpful):

  • Above the "Save" and "Preview" buttons, there's a long thin horizontal text entry element labeled "Summary".
    • It's ideal if every edit (considering the points above first) is submitted with a short description of what work was done. This allows that both RecentChanges and page histories are more useful for etc. etc.

Lastly, the "Minor Edit" checkbox:

  • "Minor" is not a measure of size, but a measure of affect :-)

If you need any help with anything, drop me a message here or on my talk page, and I'll be notified. -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 04:56, 25 June 2014 (CEST)