Tips & guidelines link
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| − | Once that you are provided with an account, and with the privileges to edit your organization page and | + | Once that you are provided with an account, and consequently with the privileges to edit your organization's page and sub-pages, just keep in mind the following principles and guidelines. |
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| + | *Thus Mediawiki and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext wiki text] are not precisely user-friendly (for a legitimate reason, that is precisely to encourage the creation of quality contents) we have provided this platform with all the tools to make the creation and editing of contents as easy and profitable as possible, in such a way that supposedly any member of a center of Italian culture and language with an average IT literacy, will be able to create and edit all the required information, and to address himself or herself either to the IT department of their organization or to the editorial staff of this platform, only to enhance the general structure of their pages, or to fix some issue. | ||
| + | <noinclude><!--On a first stage, edits or creation of your pages will be moderated. That means that once an administrator does not grant you with the role of "moderator", your edits or created pages will be not publicly visible until they are not approved by an administrator. Usually we expect that the contents have to be moderated until a registered user of a center of Italian language and culture shows a sufficient expertise (however this is achieved), or their set of pages reaches a certain degree of completeness: after that, all the affiliated users of that center will be assigned to the role of "moderator" and their edits will not be required of being approved anymore.--> | ||
| + | *Privileges for editing and accessing pages throughout this platform are automatically handled. Typically, an account managed by a given center of Italian culture and language, can edit only the pages of the organization to which it is affiliated, and can create contents of public interest (like [[Opportunities]], [[Reading suggestions]], [[Digital_library/Authors|open source books]]) as long as they are being created through a form (see picture 1, which displays a list visible in the side panel once logged-in) or as long they have been created using the same account. | ||
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| + | *After signing up, your organization's page and sub-pages will be only accessible and editable by your staff and the administrators of {{CI inline logo}} and they will not yet be visible to the general audience. Once that your organization's page and its related pages will reach a sufficient level of completeness, they will be "enabled" by site-administrators and from that moment you, as organization, will be fully responsible of your pages, and any page that you create/edit/delete/move (within your "domain") will be not anymore moderated in any way. | ||
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| + | *Any new additional page that you create is automatically set as "draft", that is, it gets an unpublished state. Please check [[How_it_works/Page status & SEO|Page status & SEO]] to find out more about that feature: you can publish it as soon as is ready for that and even to set some meta information intended to search engines. | ||
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| + | *Once it has been created, the page of your organization contains a standard content model, that is a predefined set a sections (like Abstract, Location, Gallery, Courses, etc.) that you can use to organize your contents. Of course they are so just as an example, and everything can be reorganized as you think it's better. However, contents/pages created using available forms (like [[Special:FormEdit/Post|Post]], [[Special:FormEdit/Article|Article]], and so on – check [[How_it_works/Semantic_forms_and_structured_data|Semantic forms and structured data]] for all available kind of contents) will be saved at a specific path, like [your organization]/Articles/[article name] and the intermediate pages (in this case the page "Articles") will be created as well if not existing, and filled-in with with an [https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Inline_queries ask query] to display a table of related contents. Of course this is done for convenience, but again contents created, either automatically or not, can be edited/rearranged in whatever way.<!-- Following we will add the possibility to include an arbitrary path --> | ||
| + | <!-- | ||
| + | Upon sign-up, either that your main organization page will be created by our staff, or directly by you through the [[Special:FormEdit/Organization|appropriate form]], the form itself will create a predefined page model, so you can just fill-in the related sections, provided that your page and its sub-pages can be organized how do you think it is better: the model is to be considered just as a suggestion. Also, each time that you create a content through the related form (for instance an article, a "post", a language course, etc.) and that kind of content is being created for the first time, our platform will automatically create the related intermediate pages, with a list of relevant contents within them: again, these contents are created for convenience, and they can be used as a reference to organize your data in the proper way, but finally all that can be deleted or replaced with contents entirely created **comment start**a formatting entirely decided**comment end** by you. --> | ||
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| + | *In a first time, please create all your organization's contents either in English or Italian, inasmuch as the contents of this platform are not only addressed to your specific audience, but to other organizations as well (or in the first place), so they can be accessible by a common language, or "lingua franca" (English for the international community, and the national language for the related community. In a second time you can create pages also in the official language of your hosting country, and the internationalization for each of them (i.e., the page's language) will be either automatically determined by our platform, or manually inserted/adjusted by you, in order to show on the front-end pages in a language fitted to visitors. <br />Currently (December 2020) we have not yet implemented a method to handle internationalization of the main organization's page itself, inasmuch that should be done on the basis of specific feedback and requirements by organizations interested in that feature. | ||
| + | <!-- | ||
| + | Create your contents in the language which usually you adopt dealing with your audience. That could be the official language of your hosting country, English (if not all the members of your team are fluent with the local language) or Italian itself. If the main language of your contents is not English or Italian, we require that you create an alternate page in English or Italian at least for the primary pages: otherwise, a generic audience will not be able to access those pages, given that the main purpose of this platform is precisely the interrelation among organizations and their audience.--> | ||
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| + | *If you don't have an IT department, and you need a bit of time to get used with a Mediawiki system, just send your website (the main page and the set of sub-pages representing your organization) to the editorial staff as a collection of "Word" or, preferably, Open Office/LibreOffice documents, with placeholders for pictures (to be attached separately), tables, and other rich content within them, and the editorial staff will create all your organization's pages on your behalf. (as a courtesy).<br> By doing so, just check the following [[Istituto_cultura_italiana_(NGO)|organization's page]] as a reference of a possible "site" structure, and the set of forms to be found [[How_it_works/Forms_%26_semantic_data|here]] in order to put together a meaningful set of data. For instance, once that you know that the form "article", is structured [[Special:FormEdit/Article|this way]], you can just create an Open Office/LibreOffice document for each article, post, or "news", with all the required information, so that the editorial staff will not have to get back to you with further requirements. The same applies for all the forms which can be found in the [[How it works/Forms & semantic data|same page]]. (to be noted that the example organization does not use yet all the available forms) | ||
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| + | <!-- | ||
*By contrast to what you would expect, '''wiki is not user-friendly'''. This, indeed, at first may hurt you, but actually that is the requisite to create not only quality contents, but also contents not constrained in a specific formatting standard. For this reason, we strongly encourage you to initiate a cooperation with your IT (information technology) department to send forth and back to it your contents, in order to reach the desired results shortly. Of course, also your students with some IT skill might be involved in that work. However, inasmuch as they are typically good, their expertise could be not sufficient, and the final revision of your pages should be always reviewed by professionals. | *By contrast to what you would expect, '''wiki is not user-friendly'''. This, indeed, at first may hurt you, but actually that is the requisite to create not only quality contents, but also contents not constrained in a specific formatting standard. For this reason, we strongly encourage you to initiate a cooperation with your IT (information technology) department to send forth and back to it your contents, in order to reach the desired results shortly. Of course, also your students with some IT skill might be involved in that work. However, inasmuch as they are typically good, their expertise could be not sufficient, and the final revision of your pages should be always reviewed by professionals. | ||
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*Because the point above, <html><span style="font-size: 32px;line-height: 1em;padding-right: 6px" class="BroadcastMatter">Cultura italiana</span></html> foresees that you can send such contents to the email address <span style="color:blue;background:#f5f5f5">redazione@culturaitaliana.org</span> and the editorial staff will create for you your organization's pages, for free. However, this is not the best solution on the long term since by this way you will be prevented to structure your pages in an autonomous way and the editorial staff will be required to ask you all the necessary information via email, and you will have to address continuously to them for any non-minor editing. | *Because the point above, <html><span style="font-size: 32px;line-height: 1em;padding-right: 6px" class="BroadcastMatter">Cultura italiana</span></html> foresees that you can send such contents to the email address <span style="color:blue;background:#f5f5f5">redazione@culturaitaliana.org</span> and the editorial staff will create for you your organization's pages, for free. However, this is not the best solution on the long term since by this way you will be prevented to structure your pages in an autonomous way and the editorial staff will be required to ask you all the necessary information via email, and you will have to address continuously to them for any non-minor editing. | ||
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*We are considering whether to add an alternate, streamlined interface (likewise the [https://culturaitaliana.org/pages/How_it_works frontend] side of the platform) also for creation and editing of pages, including creation and editing of semantic contents (i.e. contents of fields of the available forms). It is possible that it will be available in the near future, however, as above, we encourage you and your team to just get equipped with the expertise and skills necessary to deal with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext wiki text] (or alternatively with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#:~:text=Markdown%20is%20a%20lightweight%20markup,using%20a%20plain%20text%20editor. markdown], as another possible content model) inasmuch as whatever interface will constrain you to a specific formatting and you will not take advantage of the full potential of this platform, if not indirectly. | *We are considering whether to add an alternate, streamlined interface (likewise the [https://culturaitaliana.org/pages/How_it_works frontend] side of the platform) also for creation and editing of pages, including creation and editing of semantic contents (i.e. contents of fields of the available forms). It is possible that it will be available in the near future, however, as above, we encourage you and your team to just get equipped with the expertise and skills necessary to deal with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext wiki text] (or alternatively with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#:~:text=Markdown%20is%20a%20lightweight%20markup,using%20a%20plain%20text%20editor. markdown], as another possible content model) inasmuch as whatever interface will constrain you to a specific formatting and you will not take advantage of the full potential of this platform, if not indirectly. | ||
| − | *Create your contents in the language which usually you adopt dealing with your audience. That could be the official language of your hosting country, English (if not all the members of your team are fluent with the local language) or Italian itself. | + | *Create your contents in the language which usually you adopt dealing with your audience. That could be the official language of your hosting country, English (if not all the members of your team are fluent with the local language) or Italian itself. If the main language of your contents is not English or Italian, we require that you create an alternate page in English or Italian at least for the primary pages: otherwise, a generic audience will not be able to access those pages, given that the main purpose of this platform is precisely the interrelation among organizations and their audience. |
| + | |||
| + | *If you need a bit of time to learn the wiki text and the intimate functioning of mediawiki, just send your website (the main page and the set of subpages representing your organization) to the editorial staff as a collection of "Word" or, preferably, Open Office documents, with pictures, tables, and other rich content within them, and they will create the related pages on your behalf. By doing so, just check the following [[Istituto_cultura_italiana_(NGO)|organization's page]] as reference of a possible "site" structure, and the set of forms to be found [[How_it_works/Forms_%26_semantic_data|here]] in order to put together a meaningful set of data. For instance, once that you know that the form "article", is structured [[Special:FormEdit/Article|this way]], you can just create a "Word" or Open Office document for each article, post, or "news", with all the required information, so that the editorial staff will not have to get back to you with further requirements. The same applies for all the forms which can be found in the [[How it works/Forms & semantic data|same page]]. (to be noted that the example organization does not use yet all the available forms) | ||
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*If, by contrast, your team includes some IT professional or you feel enough courageous (after a preliminary phase of study, and trials) to deal with wiki text and the autonomous creation of pages and contents, just follow the following (sub) tips: | *If, by contrast, your team includes some IT professional or you feel enough courageous (after a preliminary phase of study, and trials) to deal with wiki text and the autonomous creation of pages and contents, just follow the following (sub) tips: | ||
| − | **First. Check the interface. After logging in you will see on the left the left navigation bar (picture 1), with some standard links, plus (a) the organization to which you are affiliated, (b) the list of available forms, and (c) the list of available templates (for a description about what templates and forms serve, see [[How_it_works/Forms_%26_semantic_data|here]], or keep reading). On the top you will find the top menu (picture 2) with the tabs "read" (the display of the article), "Edit" (the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG WYSIWYG] editor of the article), "Edit source", the wiki text editor of the article, and following the button "Add form" by which you can add '''to the current article''' one of the available forms if the article does not contains any form: indeed a constraint of this wiki is that you cannot insert more than one form within an article, due to our specific data structure. [[File:How it works/Tips & guidelines/Wiki left panel.png|thumb|picture 1]][[File: | + | **First. Check the interface. After logging in you will see on the left the left navigation bar (picture 1), with some standard links, plus (a) the organization to which you are affiliated, (b) the list of available forms, and (c) the list of available templates (for a description about what templates and forms serve, see [[How_it_works/Forms_%26_semantic_data|here]], or keep reading). On the top you will find the top menu (picture 2) with the tabs "read" (the display of the article), "Edit" (the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG WYSIWYG] editor of the article), "Edit source", the wiki text editor of the article, and following the button "Add form" by which you can add '''to the current article''' one of the available forms if the article does not contains any form: indeed a constraint of this wiki is that you cannot insert more than one form within an article, due to our specific data structure. [[File:How it works/Tips & guidelines/Wiki left panel.png|thumb|picture 1]][[File:How_it_works/Tips_&_guidelines/Wiki_top_menu.jpg|alt=|thumb|422x422px|picture 2]] |
**So now you know that you can edit an article either using the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor Visual Editor] or just dealing with the wiki text: the latter choice is more tough at first, but, as all the difficult things, that one with the greatest potential: indeed, Visual editor is "just" an automatic way of translating forth and back html (that is the visual appearance) to wiki text, and thus for some of the edits it could be quicker, it is constrained, in such a way that, more importantly, the complexity and quality of Wikipedia articles would have not been possible (in a sense, paradoxically) if Wikipedia had been provided with Visual editor from the beginning, and that had been the only method of insertion. | **So now you know that you can edit an article either using the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor Visual Editor] or just dealing with the wiki text: the latter choice is more tough at first, but, as all the difficult things, that one with the greatest potential: indeed, Visual editor is "just" an automatic way of translating forth and back html (that is the visual appearance) to wiki text, and thus for some of the edits it could be quicker, it is constrained, in such a way that, more importantly, the complexity and quality of Wikipedia articles would have not been possible (in a sense, paradoxically) if Wikipedia had been provided with Visual editor from the beginning, and that had been the only method of insertion. | ||
**So now you know that wiki text is not so bad as it seems, and possibly you will switch from one method of editing to the other as long as you experience some limitation with Visual editor (just to tell one, you cannot insert sub-items of lists with some element in the middle, and you have to use the template [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Bulleted_list Bulleted_list] instead) and the reason for such limitations (indeed in the mentioned case, using a word processor, you would just adjust the layout until reaching the desired appearance) is that, using a visual interface, it would even too easy to break typographical rules, or just to not adhere to any formatting standard, and on the contrary you are allowed to be completely free only at a cost to dealing with wiki text, so that it is understood that usually in this case you know what you are doing: because there is no other way to deal in a satisfactory manner with that. | **So now you know that wiki text is not so bad as it seems, and possibly you will switch from one method of editing to the other as long as you experience some limitation with Visual editor (just to tell one, you cannot insert sub-items of lists with some element in the middle, and you have to use the template [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Bulleted_list Bulleted_list] instead) and the reason for such limitations (indeed in the mentioned case, using a word processor, you would just adjust the layout until reaching the desired appearance) is that, using a visual interface, it would even too easy to break typographical rules, or just to not adhere to any formatting standard, and on the contrary you are allowed to be completely free only at a cost to dealing with wiki text, so that it is understood that usually in this case you know what you are doing: because there is no other way to deal in a satisfactory manner with that. | ||
| − | **So now you know why Mediawiki does not provide an editor as easy as a word processor: because it is not desirable in order to achieve an homogeneous formatting (or typographical) standard, given that theoretically (!) anyone can contribute to and edit Wikipedia (Wikimedia, at bottom) articles, and because you can be completely unconstrained (or unconstrained in a productive way, that is based on knowledge, and creativity) going back to the mechanisms and logic producing the elements, rather than just manipulating those elements without a broader knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity. This is also the reason because the method of sending to the editorial staff of this wiki your site's contents until you don't reach this expertise, can work (thus at a price) : because the documents will be not translated to html or wiki text ''as they are'', but (hopefully) they | + | **So now you know why Mediawiki does not provide an editor as easy as a word processor: because it is not desirable in order to achieve an homogeneous formatting (or typographical) standard, given that theoretically (!) anyone can contribute to and edit Wikipedia (Wikimedia, at bottom) articles, and because you can be completely unconstrained (or unconstrained in a productive way, that is based on knowledge, and creativity) going back to the mechanisms and logic producing the elements, rather than just manipulating those elements without a broader knowledge and some aesthetic sensitivity. This is also the reason because the method of sending to the editorial staff of this wiki your site's contents until you don't reach this expertise, can work (thus at a price) : because the documents will be not translated to html or wiki text ''as they are'', but (hopefully) they will be used as source of information to be placed in the proper typographical and semantic structure. |
| − | + | **Secondly (now that you know the rational of both Visual editor and the wiki text editor (button "Edit source") check the wiki text of the [[Istituto_cultura_italiana_(NGO)|example page]]. You will see, apart the template "Form organization" which holds the data retrieved from the corresponding form, that '''the "code" does contain much less information of that contained in the page itself''' (once rendered). The same applies for the main page of this [[How it works]] area. How does it work ? The answer can be found in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Transclusion this page] and the (bizarre) name of the feature is "transclusion", which is a mean to include a portion or all the content of a page into another page by reference, which is indeed especially useful when you have to put together the information sparse on various pages, for showcasing them, in such a way that the edits done on the source contents will just reflect automatically in the target page, so that you have only a "source of truth" and you can keep working on that: we are not sure whether that can be done or not easily using a common word processor, but the answer is that, while this is a shocking feature of Mediawiki, it still covers almost up to the limit imaginable, the realm of digital typography. | |
| + | --> | ||
| + | {{CI clear div}} | ||
(to be continued!) | (to be continued!) | ||
</noinclude> | </noinclude> | ||
Latest revision as of 08:17, 18 July 2021
Once that you are provided with an account, and consequently with the privileges to edit your organization's page and sub-pages, just keep in mind the following principles and guidelines.
- Thus Mediawiki and wiki text are not precisely user-friendly (for a legitimate reason, that is precisely to encourage the creation of quality contents) we have provided this platform with all the tools to make the creation and editing of contents as easy and profitable as possible, in such a way that supposedly any member of a center of Italian culture and language with an average IT literacy, will be able to create and edit all the required information, and to address himself or herself either to the IT department of their organization or to the editorial staff of this platform, only to enhance the general structure of their pages, or to fix some issue.
- Privileges for editing and accessing pages throughout this platform are automatically handled. Typically, an account managed by a given center of Italian culture and language, can edit only the pages of the organization to which it is affiliated, and can create contents of public interest (like Opportunities, Reading suggestions, open source books) as long as they are being created through a form (see picture 1, which displays a list visible in the side panel once logged-in) or as long they have been created using the same account.
- After signing up, your organization's page and sub-pages will be only accessible and editable by your staff and the administrators of Cultura italiana and they will not yet be visible to the general audience. Once that your organization's page and its related pages will reach a sufficient level of completeness, they will be "enabled" by site-administrators and from that moment you, as organization, will be fully responsible of your pages, and any page that you create/edit/delete/move (within your "domain") will be not anymore moderated in any way.
- Any new additional page that you create is automatically set as "draft", that is, it gets an unpublished state. Please check Page status & SEO to find out more about that feature: you can publish it as soon as is ready for that and even to set some meta information intended to search engines.
- Once it has been created, the page of your organization contains a standard content model, that is a predefined set a sections (like Abstract, Location, Gallery, Courses, etc.) that you can use to organize your contents. Of course they are so just as an example, and everything can be reorganized as you think it's better. However, contents/pages created using available forms (like Post, Article, and so on – check Semantic forms and structured data for all available kind of contents) will be saved at a specific path, like [your organization]/Articles/[article name] and the intermediate pages (in this case the page "Articles") will be created as well if not existing, and filled-in with with an ask query to display a table of related contents. Of course this is done for convenience, but again contents created, either automatically or not, can be edited/rearranged in whatever way.
- In a first time, please create all your organization's contents either in English or Italian, inasmuch as the contents of this platform are not only addressed to your specific audience, but to other organizations as well (or in the first place), so they can be accessible by a common language, or "lingua franca" (English for the international community, and the national language for the related community. In a second time you can create pages also in the official language of your hosting country, and the internationalization for each of them (i.e., the page's language) will be either automatically determined by our platform, or manually inserted/adjusted by you, in order to show on the front-end pages in a language fitted to visitors.
Currently (December 2020) we have not yet implemented a method to handle internationalization of the main organization's page itself, inasmuch that should be done on the basis of specific feedback and requirements by organizations interested in that feature.
- If you don't have an IT department, and you need a bit of time to get used with a Mediawiki system, just send your website (the main page and the set of sub-pages representing your organization) to the editorial staff as a collection of "Word" or, preferably, Open Office/LibreOffice documents, with placeholders for pictures (to be attached separately), tables, and other rich content within them, and the editorial staff will create all your organization's pages on your behalf. (as a courtesy).
By doing so, just check the following organization's page as a reference of a possible "site" structure, and the set of forms to be found here in order to put together a meaningful set of data. For instance, once that you know that the form "article", is structured this way, you can just create an Open Office/LibreOffice document for each article, post, or "news", with all the required information, so that the editorial staff will not have to get back to you with further requirements. The same applies for all the forms which can be found in the same page. (to be noted that the example organization does not use yet all the available forms)
(to be continued!)