Help:Editing

general help

For general help in editing please read Wikipedia's "Editing cheatsheet", or see MediaWiki's Help:Editing.

ThinkWiki editing policies

write with other users in your mind

When you write an article, keep the following things in mind...

• Respect others. Try sticking to a neutral point of view. Respect the work of other writers. Respect your (potential) readers.
• ThinkWiki is not only about the newest models. Try to write in a way that is open for older, newer and future models. This especially regards the structuring of the information you provide.
• ThinkWiki is not only about your Distro. Try to make clear if something you write is valid only for your specific linux distribution.
• Even though the article is written by you, it is a piece of information others might work on later. Try to avoid personal remarks in your articles.

naming policies for new pages

If you create a new page, please consider the following page naming policies. This is important to keep a persistent page naming scheme and hence to ensure that ThinkWiki still works well when it has grown more complex.

Page names (the links you create to point to the page) are used as the page Title. Considering these policies has the following advantages:

• the pages will have self-explaining titles
• in Category views like the Model view the links to the pages are expressively labeled and similar pages are sorted together
• the pages are more easily found in search engines like google

general policies

• It is allowed and in fact wanted that you use spaces within your page titles.
• The name you choose for the page should be as specific as its content will be. In other words...it should not be possible to write another page with more general content about the topic that your page title indicates.

specific kinds of pages

To sort similar pages together in the Model views, we start specific pages in defined ways. The following table shows the naming schemes for several kinds of pages...

page naming schemes

page type	naming scheme	example
Installation instructions overview for a model	Installation instructions for the <model>	Installation instructions for the ThinkPad T41p
Installation instructions for a specific distro on a model	Installing <distro> on a <model>	Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad T41p
other HowTos	How to ...	How to get special keys to work
Problem descriptions	Problem with ...	Problem with lm-sensors
Drivers and Tools pages	<name of driver/tool>	ibm-acpi
Patches	Patch ...	Patch disabling ACPI C3
Components	<name of component as used by IBM>	IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II
Distro pages	Category:<distro>	Category:SUSE
ThinkPad Models	Category:<Model without "ThinkPad">	Category:T41p
Specifications	<type number-model number>	2373-GHG

use semantic formatting

Please prefer semantic formatting over beauty. To help maintaining a formatting standard, you can use the following templates.

NOTE!

Unfortunately, nesting templates is not possible. I.e. you can't put a cmd template inside a NOTE template.

syntax	resulting output
{{cmduser|command}}	$ command
{{cmduser|command | pipe}}	$ command | pipe
{{cmdroot|command}}	# command
{{cmdgrub|command}}	grub> command
{{cmdresult|shell output}}	shell output
{{cmd|command|prefix>}}	prefix> command
{{bootparm|parameter|value}}	parameter=value
{{path|/etc/config.cfg}}	/etc/config.cfg
{{kernelconf|CONFIG_SCSI|[M]|SCSI device support|SCSI device support|Device Drivers||}} {{kernelconf|CONFIG_SCSI|[M]|SCSI device support||||}} {{kernelconf|CONFIG_SCSI|[M]|||||}} {{kernelconf|CONFIG_SCSI||||||}} {{kernelconf||[M]|SCSI device support||||}} specify the menuconfig path in reverse order and fill with empty parameters to at least a total of seven	Device Drivers → SCSI device support → [M]SCSI device support (CONFIG_SCSI) [M]SCSI device support (CONFIG_SCSI) [M] (CONFIG_SCSI) (CONFIG_SCSI) [M]SCSI device support
{{HINT|A suggestion.}}	Hint: A suggestion.
{{NOTE|Take notice!}}	NOTE! Take notice!
{{WARN|Be careful!}}	ATTENTION! Be careful!
{{HELP|Request for help}}	Help needed Request for help
{{QUOTE|Master Foo|zen-devel|Your theories on the sound of one hand clapping are quite interesting.}}	Master Foo wrote on zen-devel: Your theories on the sound of one hand clapping are quite interesting.
{{key|Fn}}{{key|F4}}	FnF4
{{ibmkey|Access IBM|#495988}} = {{ibmkey|ThinkPad|#494949}}	Access IBM = ThinkPad
to be commented{{footnote|1}}	to be commented1
{{footnotes| #first footnote #second footnote }}	FOOTNOTES [Δ] first footnote second footnote

Tables

When adding tables, you might want to use our special {{Cyes}}, {{Cno}} and {{Cunk}} tags.

Syntax	Resulting output
{{Cyes}}	yes
{{Cno}}	no
{{Cpart}}	partial
{{Cunk}}	unknown
{{Cunk}} (should work)	unknown (should work)
{{Cunk|text=}} custom text	custom text

use our Link&Categorization Templates

To ease editing and to provide a standardized way of linking to a category and categorizing the page at the same time in that category, we introduced the following Templates. So far there are two types of these:

• Model Templates. Just write the model number surrounded by winged brackets, like i.e. {{T40}}. This will be equivalent to [[:Category:T40|T40]] [[Category:T40]]. Hence the result will be a link like this: T40, but at the same time, the page will be categorized under that category.
• Distribution Templates. They work the same way as Model Templates, except that for them you need to specify the Distribution name (simplest, shortest variant of it). It will create a link to that distributions category page and also categorize the page you used the template on under that category.

use our Editorial Templates

syntax	resulting output
{{Stub}} (Use only at the beginning of pages!)	This page is a stub You can help ThinkWiki by expanding it.
{{Todo|needs editing}}	TODO needs editing
{{Fixme|preliminary information}}	FIXME preliminary information
{{Usage|do this and that}} (Use only at the beginning of pages!)	How to use this page Do this and that

Have fun editing!