Help:Contributions-Getting Started

This page can help new editors/contributors get started using Antwiki. There are some step-by-step guides to help you learn some basic editing tasks and a general overview of how Antwiki is organized. Click on any heading in the Table of Contents to jump directly to any section of this page.

Never Used Wiki Software?
You will not be able to make any edits unless you are signed in using your editor login information. See the User Accounts page for details of how to obtain an editor profile.

Search
There is a search box on the top right of every Antwiki page. If the search criteria is exact match of an existing page title, e.g., Collecting Ants, your search will take you to that page. If the search criteria is not a page name, e.g., collecting, you will see a list of pages that include the search term(s).

Editing
You can learn some basic editing skills - adding text, uploading and displaying images, adding links, and so on - by editing your user profile page. The next few sections will show you how to make changes to your account webpage.

Your Profile Page
A user Profile Page is created with your Antwiki account. The title of this page is "User:" + "username" (username = the name you use to login to Antwiki). An editors account allows you to make changes to Antwiki, and all of your edits are attributed to your username. Here is an example of a few edits from an Antwiki page history:

Anyone can click on these usernames and open the profile page of each editor. When you are logged in, you can open your own profile page by clicking on your username shown on the top right of every Antwiki page.

Add Contact Information to your Profile
Name Address email
 * Go to your profile page (see above for instructions on how to get there).
 * On your profile page click on the "Edit" tab that is found in the upper right of the page.
 * Type in the following contact information:
 * Click the “Save page” button found on the bottom left of the page, just under the editing window.
 * You will now see the information you added on your profile page.

Add an Image to your Profile
Prepare a suitable jpg image file on your computer.

Upload the image Every image shown on Antwiki has been uploaded to the website.
 * Click on the "Upload file" link, on the left side of any page, under Toolbox heading.
 * Click on the "browse" button and select the image you have prepared as your source file.
 * Type your username in the "destination filename" box
 * In the summary field type in your full name, e.g., Gregor Bračko
 * Click on the "Upload file" button on the bottom left side of the page.
 * A new page - File:yourname.jpg - is created. You should see this name at the top left side of the page in a large bold font. You should also see your picture on this page.

Insert the image into your profile page.
 * Click on your username, shown on the top right of any Antwiki page, to go to your user profile page.
 * On your profile page click on the "Edit" tab found on the upper right of the page.
 * You should see a framed window in the center of the page. Add the following in this edit window [[File:yourname.jpg]], replacing "yourname" with your username.
 * The dimensions of the image displayed can be set by adding a pixel width to the image information, e.g., yourname.jpg, with 000 being replaced by a number such as 250 or 300.
 * Click on the “Save page” button found on the bottom right of the page, just under the editing window.

You should now see your picture on your profile page.

If you are not an ant taxonomist, you can expand the profile page to include biographical information, publications, or whatever else you wish to present here that is related to ants and your biology work.

You are also welcome to create a separate Antwiki webpage that has your name as its title, e.g., "familyname, givenname" rather than your User:username. You can go here to learn how to create a new page, then return to this page to and begin the next section to see how to link this to your profile page.

Creating a link from your User Profile to another webpage
You can add a link to a page on a different website or to a different Antwiki page.

A non-Antwiki webpage
 * determine the URL that you want to link to, e.g., https://antvisions.wordpress.com/
 * determine the link text you want to show on your profile page, e.g., "Ajay Narendra's Blog"
 * A link to a non-antwiki webpage is created by using brackets to enclose the URL, followed by a space, and then the link text. The generic form - [URL linktext]< and an example using the information above Ajay Narendra's Blog . On the webpage this would be shown as Ajay Narendra's Blog.

'''Please do not post links to inappropriate webpages. Links should be to websites like a lab page, another ant websites, your personal blog that includes information about ants, etc.'''

An Antwiki webpage If you are an ant taxonomist you likely already have a Taxonomist webpage (follow that link, click on the letter that begins your family name, then find your name in that list. Clicking on your name will...
 * open your ant taxonomist page
 * From the URL, copy the page title from your taxonomist page. This is all the text after "https://antwiki.org/wiki/" . For example, at http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Emery,_Carlo_(1848-1925) you would want to copy "Emery,_Carlo_(1848-1925)"
 * All links between Antwiki webpages are formatted using double brackets  and a pipe | (on my keyboard the pipe symbol is on the key above my enter key). The double brackets should contain the page title, a pipe, and the link text: linktext or with our example here Carlo Emery
 * Save your user profile.

Add Text to a Species Page
Go to the page for an ant species that you know well. Find this page by entering the binomial name in the search box on the top right side of any page and clicking on Go.

To add text click on the "Edit" tab found on the upper right hand side of the page. You will then see text contained in a boxed window in the center of the page. Don't worry about any strangely formatted text you see. Page headings are surrounded by "=" and look like this ==Biology== and ===Taxonomy===. Enter some new text under an appropriate heading and then click on the “Save page” or “Show preview” button (these are found on the bottom right of the page, just under the editing window).


 * "Show preview" will show you what the page will look like if you save the page. The preview is shown on the top of the page and the edit window is at the bottom of the page.


 * "Save page" does just what you expect. The page will now show the species page with your newly added changes.

What Next?
You now know enough to get started editing pages. You can learn more about specific editing tasks by looking at Help or by looking at what has already been entered on existing pages (if you click edit on any existing page you will see how the page content is formatted).

There are many ways you can contribute to Antwiki. You can create new pages, edit named pages, add images to taxaboxes, contribute images, work on regional projects or start a new project.