APL Wiki
EditingGuidelines
Contents
Overview
The APL Wiki contains many kinds of information. You are free to edit almost all of this, but your changes must be appropriate to the material.
For ephemera such as forums, your voice is just one of many and you are free to express yourself as you wish.
For code contributions, your coding style is your own, but you should take some care to put your contribution where it fits best, and you should document the interface to your code at least as well as others have documented theirs. If your contribution is a zip or other binary file, see the policy on attachments.
Keep these rules in mind when editing reference documentation:
Make sure your changes are accurate. If you think something needs explaining but you're not 100% sure what the explanation should be, just insert the word ExplainMe and someone will come along to make the change properly.
- Avoid "thread mode", where you simply add your thoughts to a page without taking the trouble to make the page a unified whole. Thread mode is OK in Forums but not in documentation.
Be sure to enclose APL code between backticks or {{{ }}}
New Authors
If you are new to wikis, see the Beginner's Guide to editing wiki pages.
- Create new pages at the appropriate place (article, guide,...).
Page names can use CamelCase, i.e. each word capitalized and no blanks. Page names can also contain blanks as in "My Page".
To refer to a page, insert a reference like this example: [:MyNewPage:User's Info] which will be displayed as "User's Info".
To reduce the risk of name conflicts, page names might use sub-pages, a MoinMoin construct which looks like a folder structure.
More about Sub-Pages
StringsManipulations/Split would be a nice name which takes advantage of the sub-page-concept, for example. It does not only reduce the danger of name clashes but also offers the user the opportunity to get a list of all pages related to the "folder" StringsManipulations by punching in StringsManip.
A Warning
- Do not create additional levels of sub-pages unless you have a very good reason for that. It is harder to refactor and move pages then.
To move pages, just rename them. You need to be logged in, then go to the page and select "Rename" from the drop down menu. You also need to modify all pages referring to that page - the wiki will not automatically update the links. Wikis are not Content-Management-Systems.
Hide complexity
In case that a particular topic is complex, you might have to provide quite a large amount of information. On the Web, chances are that a user will stop reading any information at all if she gets flooded with too many pieces of information.
A common technique to deal with this problem is to provide only essential information but to allow the user to "show" more information usually represented by a short description. That can be done in two very different ways:
- Splitting it into different pages, adding links to sub-pages
- Represent the details by a short description and make it visible by a click on it without the additional drawback of a page reload.
The former technique has it's merits, of course, but it comes with drawbacks as well: If the sub-pieces are relatively small but their total number is high, it might increase the number of pages dramatically. Not helpful at all when searching pages.
In those cases a hide/show mechamism local to that page is certainly an alternative. The APL wiki supports this via JavaScript. For details see the SeeSaw page.
Categories
InterWiki Linking
Among different ways pages can be linked, common external resources, such as WikiPedia, MathWorld:MathWorld or OEIS:OEIS (Sloane), can be conveniently referenced in a uniform way with the help of InterWiki syntax. There are two common variations:
target name used as is: WikiPedia:Euler will produce Euler
or substituted with an alias: [wiki:WikiPedia/Euler Leonhard Euler] will become Leonhard Euler
InterWiki syntax is compact, site names are easy to remember, and page content is isolated from future changes of the link address.
Other useful links: [ISBN]ISBN (Amazon): ISBN (Amazon)
Authorship
We recommend that you add an authorship statement to any page where you have made a substantial contribution to the contents. Exactly what is a "substantial contribution" is left to your discretion.
Use your wiki name (create one if necessary), so that a link is created to your wiki home page.
We recommend that this be done at the foot of the page but on top of CategoryReference, as in the following examples:
Contributed by IkeNewton.
Contributed by IkeNewton, with further contributions by LeoEuler, CarlGauss, PaulErdos, ...
Contributed by IkeNewton, found to be ill-written and then completely reworked by PomPosity.
Owned Pages
You can take ownership of a page, so that only you have the ability to change it. See OwnedPages..
Navigation Integrity
The simplicity of Wiki format to include links can easily be abused if care is not taken about accidentally introducing an non-link using WikiName syntax or leaving a page without references.
When finished editing, check your links and verify the problem lists. In some cases to remove a problem it is required to Delete Cache from menu on the referring page as well as the problem list page for a change to take effect. This is often the case when the linked page is created after the referer is last changed. Redirections need to be added into Exceptions to be explicitly orphaned.
Another way to check if page is linked correctly is to click on the page title from itself. This will show all linkto pages.
In this wiki, MoinMoin's "Category" feature is used heavily. See WhyUsingCategories for important details!
Note: Don't use underscore
[:Like_This] in links, use space 
[:Like This] instead. Otherwise the link is not recognized by problem lists.
Reusing Page Name
If you want to delete an obsolete page and then rename a different page to its name, you cannot do it directly in MoinMoin. Instead, rename the obsolete to Trash/Page Name, then rename the different page to its name. All the Trash/ child pages will be periodically purged by administrators.