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 subpages, just keep in mind the following guidelines and principles. | 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. | ||
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| + | * Thus wiki 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. | ||
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| + | *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. | ||
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| + | *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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*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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**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. | **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. | **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. | ||
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(to be continued!) | (to be continued!) | ||
</noinclude> | </noinclude> | ||
Revision as of 08:18, 24 August 2020
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.
- Thus wiki 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.
- 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.
- 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.
(to be continued!)