How to contribute
From Contesting
There are several different ways to contribute to the Contesting Compendium, depending on what you have to contribute and how ambitious you are. Before you do anything, though, you'll need to create a user account. We pledge not to share your information with anyone else. It would probably be best to use your callsign as your username, so that we'll recognize who you are.
Please don't think that you don't have the knowledge and experience to participate in creating the Contesting Compendium. Whatever your level of contesting experience or writing credentials, you bring a unique perspective to every topic, and your contributions can help make us what we aim to be - the first stop for all contesters looking for information about our sport.
1. Write an original article. Write an original article on a topic that you feel should be included in the Contesting Wiki. Feel free to supplement our table of contents
2. Edit a page or article that is already in the Contesting Compendium. Many pages will be editable - a few, mostly articles that the author does not want to have edited, will be edit-protected. A page that can be edited will show an edit tab at the top. In the case of a long page, individual sections may be individually editable - in that case, look for the [edit] link near the top right corner of the section. Even in the case of a page that is protected, your input is welcome. Click on the Discussion tab at the top and you can leave as detailed a comment as you wish. We will pay attention.
3. Contribute an existing article. If you do this, please make sure that you have the author's permission, and that no copyright is being violated. It might be best to contribute things you have written yourself, to avoid having to get permission. Often, this will not be much of a problem; NCJ, for example, does not assert rights to anything it has published, so all you need for an NCJ article is permission of the author. For uniformity's sake, please include the following immediately under the title and author of an article:
Republished with the permission of the author.
Originally published in Name of Publication, issue date.
or
Republished with the permission of the author.
Retrieved from URL on date.
The retrieval date is particularly useful for web pages where the content may change after retrieval.
If at all possible, please get permission (or if you're the author, GIVE permission) for the article to be posted in editable form. You can watch the page for any changes, and you can decide whether to accept, modify or reject any edits, but the hope is that others will help strengthen articles in the Contesting Compendium over time.
It is probably preferable to create articles off-line, rather than on the site. If you plan to contribute a complete article that already exists (or that you've just written) in electronic form - in a word processing or .pdf file, for example - the process is pretty simple. If you're not sure where the article will eventually wind up, find the Sandbox page in the Table of Contents and click on the Edit tab. If there is already something on the page, simply scroll down below it and go to work.
If you know you want to create a new page, you can type the new page's title in the Search box to the left and hit "Go." Assuming it doesn't already exist, you'll be given the option to "Create this page." Click on that link and you'll be in the editor, ready to go.
The default editor uses the simple MediaWiki markup language. You'll quickly see how it works, and by comparing the editable text with the page, you'll be able to figure out formatting, internal and external links, etc. There is a very useful Help link at the bottom of the editing page, and a useful set of examples for the common sorts of markups here.
At the top of the editing page you'll notice a row of graphic buttons. Mouse over each one and you'll see what they do. Typically, if you first highlight text and then click on a button, that formatting (italics, for example, or bold, or a headline font) is applied to the text you have selected. Using MediaWiki markup language is the best way to ensure that the formatting of your contributions match the style of existing articles in the Contesting Wiki.
You'll also note, above the graphic buttons, a choice of [Rich Editor] and [Open Rich editor in new window]. These will take you to an editor that attempts to be WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get"), like the editor in Microsoft Word. It may not be completely successful in what it does, which is why we recommend opening the WYSIWYG editor in a new window - that way, when you OK out of it, you'll automatically go back to the Wikitext editor where you can see if it gave you what you want. Even then, it is usually a very good idea to preview your change before you make it. Use the Preview link at the bottom of the page to do this.
Until you actually SAVE the page you have been editing, your changes may be LOST. It is easy to open multiple copies of a page for editing and get confused about where you are. The Back button of your browser is your friend in this case.
Every time you save a page, it is logged as a change, and anyone watching that page is notified, so it's a good idea to use the preview feature, but remember that previewing doesn't save your changes. If you click on the Help link at the very bottom of the editing page, it will open help in a new window, and your editing page will remain open and accessible.
OK, so here you are. Let's say, for example, that you have an article open in Microsoft Word. Probably the easiest first step is to do Ctrl-A to select all the text, and then Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Switch back to the Contesting Compendium edit window and hit Ctrl-V to paste the text there. At this point, I suggest you save what you have so far, and look at how your page will look.
Uh-oh - the graphics didn't transfer! Unfortunately, at the present state of the art graphic files must be uploaded separately and linked into your text. That's not as bad as it sounds. The first step is to upload the file (.gif, .jpg or .png), using the Upload file link at your left. After uploading, if you forget the exact filename you used, go to the list of Special pages (also to the left) and look it up. This is important because UNIX is case-sensitive - the filename MD4K.jpg is not the same as MD4K.JPG, for example.
Once the file is uploaded, you can manually put a reference in the wikitext edit page like this:
[[Image:MD4K.JPG]]
or you can use the rich editor to insert the reference. You can use the rich editor to resize the image, using the "handles" that appear when you click on it.You can also right-click on the image and alter its properties, including its size, whether it is automatically made a thumbnail that can be blown up to full size by the reader, where it appears on the page, whether it has a caption, etc.
That's a short form explanation of the editing process - just remember that the help link at the bottom of the wikitext editing page is always available if you get stuck, or if the rich text editor produces results that aren't what you expected.
Questions? E-mail N4ZR@contesting.com
