Creating an article

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Anyone, including you, can write these help documents and you are most likely allowed to edit the site, OUCEL Wiki, that you are looking at now! Just type a title in the search box on the left, if the page you want to create doesn't exist simply click "Create article", and start writing. You can also add an article's title to the and of the "base" URL for your wiki to create an article See Starting a page through the URL.

You should probably create a link to the article in a related page; linking to a page is enough to "create" the page! New pages can also be started by following a link to a non-existent page, which likewise launches the edit page.

Contents

[edit] General principles

  • Search to see whether someone has written a similar page before you start one yourself. Choose the title carefully.
  • Review conventions of the project you are working in regarding e.g.:
  • Naming conventions.
  • Whether a separate page is justified; perhaps it is better to add the text to a related page (especially if the text is not very long); that page can always be split later, after it has grown.

[edit] Starting a page from a link, or after a search

To start a new page, you can click a link to the new page. This takes you to edit mode of the non-existing blank page, which allows creation. You might not be able to create a new page unless you are logged in. Notably this applies to the English Wikis.

Links to non-existing pages are common. They are typically created in preparation for creating the page, and/or to encourage other people to do so. Links are not only convenient for navigation, but also make people aware of the new page (those who read a related page and also those who watch the related page). New page links are not really broken, as long as the name correctly identifies the intended content. (A new page link with a "wrong" or misspelled name, or that duplicates content found under another name is "broken", but in a different sense.)

New page links typically look different from links to existing pages. Depending on settings, a different colour is used. Links to non-existent pages are created with [[New page name]] from the wiki editor. (In this case, the empty page "New page name" would be created).

You can also create the link yourself, in a related page, index page or your user page.

[edit] Starting a page through the URL

Using the web browser address bar to enter a URL to a new page is an easy way to start the new page process. Easier still is editing the pagename part of a URL for an existing page. Using the URL for the new page displays the default 'no article' message (see MediaWiki:Noarticletext). The default page has the usual Edit this page link, which can be used to begin adding content.

[edit] Protecting a page from being created

It is not really possible to protect a page from being created, but one can create a page with a standard text and then protect that page. Note that sometimes a terminology like "This page should not be created." is used even though for the system the page exists.

[edit] Non-existing pages showing info

Category and image pages are partly dynamically generated, and partly editable. A category page contains a list of pages in the category, an image page may contain an image and info from Commons. Thus if the page does not "exist" it may still show info.

The edit page of a "non-existing" category page shows the pages it contains. However, the edit page of the local page of an image on Commons neither shows the image, nor the editable content on Commons, not even in preview, it does not even indicate that viewing the page provides an image and other content from Commons.

A link to a "non-existing" category page is treated as a link to a non-existing page, even if the category is non-empty.

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