How it works/Tips & guidelines

Once that you are provided with an account, and with the privileges to edit your organization page and subpages, just keep in mind the following guidelines and principles.

• 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.

• Because the point above, Cultura italiana foresees that you can send such contents to the email address redazione@culturaitaliana.org 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.

• 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 user or a center of Italian language and culture shows a sufficient expertise (however this is achieved), or its set of pages reaches a certain degree of completeness: after that, its affiliated users will be assigned to the role of "moderator" and their edits will not be required of being approved anymore.

• Independently by your status as "moderator", as affiliated to a given organization, you will be able to edit only your organization's page and the related subpages (which can be arbitrarily created), plus, to create or edit any content created using the forms Add opportunity, Add reading suggestion, Add digital library, or any other form meant to create common contents (not intended to your organization's page and subpages), while you will be prevented to edit, create, move or delete any other page of this wiki, obviously for a matter of mutual guarantees.

• We are considering whether to add an alternate, streamlined interface (likewise the 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 wiki text (or alternatively with 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. 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 organization's page as 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 a "Word" or Open 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)
• 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 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 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.
  • So now you know that you can edit an article either using the 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 which contains 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 to the other method of editing as long as you experience some limitation with Visual editor (just to tell one, you cannot insert subitems of lists with some element in the middle, and you have to use the template 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 be 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, in such a way that it is understood that usually you know what you are doing: because there is no other way to deal in a satisfactory manner with that.

(to be continued!)