Create a new page
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So You Want To Create A Page
Creating pages on The Alcopedia is what sets us apart from other related sites, virtually any visitor to our site can contribute and we encourage people who have used our information to contribute something that perhaps we didn't have on our site, or maybe update/correct an already existing article. Editing an article is easy, all you need to do is find the article you want to contribute to and click the edit button just above the article. It's as simple as editing the text in the text box and clicking submit, and the process is pretty much what you need to do to create a whole new page, which we will discuss now.
Firstly
Please have a read of our Article Guidelines for general practises relating to articles on this site.
The Two Easiest Ways
The easiest way is by editing an existing article, for example, say the an article has the following sentence:
"The best drink in my humble opinion is Guinness, start an evening off with that and it will set you up for fun and frolics by the time last orders comes around!"
Now you've read this article, and you notice that Guinness is mentioned a lot, but there are no links to it anywhere on the page- maybe someone needs to create an article for it, and just maybe that someone is you. All you need to do is go into edit mode and add double square brackets around it, e.g. [[Guinness]]. Just by doing that, you indicate to the MediaWiki software that you want to create a link to an article named Guinness! Save that page and view it again! It should appear like this:
"The best drink in my humble opinion is Guinness, start an evening off with that and it will set you up for fun and frolics by the time last orders comes around!"
The newly created link should appear in RED, indicating there isn't currently an article on The Alcopedia about Guinness, just click that red link and you'll be presented with the editing mode discussed below. Now what if the link appears not in RED, but in BLUE? That means there is already an article about Guinness, so better luck next time chap, have another Cobra Beer :P
The second easiest way, although it is the way frowned upon by the community, is to go to http://www.alcopedia.net/index.php/Title_Of_Your_Page in your browser. Just enter a title for your page after the /index.php/ which avoids any punctuation, preferably starting with a capital letter and substituting any spaces with underscores. You'll be presented with a page ready to edit, which we will discuss further below.
This is frowned upon because it creates pages which are not linked to from anywhere else, thus making them only available to search and hard to get to.
So What Do You Do Once You Have Created A Page?
When you have created your page by the above methods, you should be taken to a page which says something along the lines of "Editing <your page title>" presenting you with a large text box, and array of interesting formatting buttons along the top and a summary box with three buttons near the bottom saying "Save Page" "Show Preview" and "Show Changes". Now you can start putting the content for your page into the big text box, the formatting buttons along the top of the text box are pretty self-explanatory if you just hover your cursor over them.
While you're creating your article, there are a number of formatting options which the buttons do not supply, there are also useful tips and tricks to make your article easier to view on The Alcopedia- for example the correct usage and nesting of headers means that a neat contents page of your article can be generated by the MediaWiki software, so your article is easier to find and read. To get to these goodies all you need to do is click the Editing Help link next to the save, preview and show buttons. Now I know there is a lot of code there, and it's very easy to get confused and mess things up, so this is why the "Show Preview" button is so useful. Whenever you're editing your article, and you want to see how it will look to other people without going ahead and saving it, just press that button and it will show you a preview. Previewing a page is always better than continuously saving the page to view your changes, because the MediaWiki software stores a copy of the previous edits to each page, and so if you create a string of edits which are nothing more than a few formatting changes then things can get a bit messy!
Once you've typed up your article, spell checked it, made sure that you're not copying anyone else, etc. You can go ahead and preview it one more time to make sure everything is pretty! When you're satisfied you can click the "Save Page" button and your changes will be commited to The Alcopedia for anyone to read!
Need More Help?
The following links will take you to places on the MediaWiki site which detail more information about creating pages, for those users who really want to get stuck in!
