Help:New User
Contents |
Editing the wiki
The SCCN Wiki is the homepage for much of the documentation relevant to the ongoing and completed projects at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. (This includes, but is not limited too, all of the major documentation for EEGLAB.)
'The primary things to keep in mind with Wiki editing is be ORGANIZED!'
Before doing anything on this wiki, you should take the time to CREATE an account and REGISTER your user profile (See Below). We require this so that we can protect our site from spamming and malicious attacks.
Registering
To create a new wiki user account, email us and we will create an account for you. We have disabled new user creation because of a recent large scale spam attack.
Creating a user account is very simple. Click the "log in" link at the top right of the page. At the next page, click "Create User Account" and fill out the information. You will receive a message at the e-mail address you provide. Click the activation link and you are ready to edit and partake in this wiki!
For users in the group 'Administrators':
Alternatively, click here to signup, logged-in users, click here to signup new user.
Once you are registered, check out the other Help Topics to become familiar with the system.
Organization
There are several types of pages on this wiki:
- Toolbox Tutorials
- Toolbox Viscera
- Miscellaneous (Concept) Tutorials
- EEGLAB Workshop pages
- SCCN Info pages
The Main Page contains a list of all of the relevant toolboxes, etc. on the site.
Each toolbox on this wiki has its own Homepage (i.e. EEGLAB or DataSuite and a corresponding category (Category:DataSuite or Category:EEGLAB) . The Homepages are the first stop for any interested party. It contains a brief description or basic information regarding the system, links to relevant information (external and local), and internal wiki links to the corresponding Tutorial pages. Some of the Toolbox Tutorials have many pages in several subcategories to keep track of the chapters much like book volumes. Although it can be confusing to have Pages and Categories with the same names, it is important for our purposes since the automated PDFs are generated based upon the Category listings.
The Namespaces are only relevant in respect to Help pages, Talk pages, and Templates. Normal editing and page creation does not require use of specific Namespace classifications.
Before making pages, please think carefully about the overall outline of all the pages. Also think about you want the pages to be connected.
See Help:Categories and Help:Subpages for more information on the classification of pages in the Wiki architecture.
The templates are an invaluable tool for interconnecting related pages in the wiki. Starting with the EEGLAB Tutorial, the "Backward Forward" template allows users to connect from one page to its logical successor without requiring clunky subpages. (Note: Try to stay away from subpages as they are clunky and have very long, often redundant titles).
Example:
{{Backward_Forward|previous page's location|previous page's name|next page's location|next page's location}} returns:
This template also provides a link to go back to the "Home" page for that template. Obviously, not every page needs to be linked back to EEGLAB. For different toolboxes, this must be changed. Thus, for DataSuite, Template:BFDS was created and for NFT, Template:BFNFT was made. To make a new navigation template, simply create a new template page and copy the source of on the previous navigation pages. Change the internal link (between the {{{2}}} and {{{3}}}) and make sure the template is in Category:Navigation. (If you've copy/pasted the template body, this should be okay).
See Help:Templates for more information on using Templates.
Automated PDF generation
The SCCN Wiki relies on the PdfBook Extension (from the Mediawiki list of extensions) and HtmlDoc for its Pdf-conversion capabilities. To generate a PdfBook, the target pages (page names in their internal link form, i.e. [[I._DataRiver_Introduction]] and so on) must be listed on a page. Somewhere on that page, needs to be:
'''[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}|action=pdfbook}} Click here to download the Full Wiki Tutorial as a PDF book]'''.
This provides a link to convert all the listed pages to a Pdf.
In addition, it is possible to make dynamic lists that update as new pages are added to a category. For this, a dpl query is used such as {{#dpl:category=I._Main_Tutorial|format=,\n*[[%NAMESPACE%:%TITLE%]],,}} to create the following list: {{#dpl:category=I._Main_Tutorial|format=,\n*%NAMESPACE%:%TITLE%,,}}
The pdf-generation link shown above will make a pdf (with appropriate table of contents) out of that list.
Page lists
Page lists for table of contents or pdf or even personal user watch-lists can be made based on the category the pages are in using either the 'Nice Category List' (tag is 'ncl') extension or the 'Dynamic Page List' (tag is 'dpl') extension. Lists made with either will dynamically update with new pages are those pages are added to the category. NCL is only applicable to Table of Contents as the PdfBook extension does not recognize lists made by ncl. However, the NCL lists are customizable to make very pretty tailored TOC's. See NiceCategoryList extension for more information on customizations.
Dynamic Page lists or dpl (used as either #dpl tag or <dpl>category="category name"</dpl> is a powerful parsing tool in the Mediawiki world. As seen above, it is very useful in creating dynamic lists for Pdf-generation or dynamic table of contents (EEGLAB Tutorial Outline). There are many other admin uses for the #dpl tag. For more information refer to Dynamic Page List Home.
Sandbox
A good wiki user will test his or her coding and fixes before saving them in the actual page. Although it is easy to undo changes in a wiki (using the history tab), it can become very confusing if people constantly change minor thing back and forth, especially if they do not write summaries regarding the changes made. Thus, please test out minor changes or dpl functionality, etc. as the Sandbox. This page is intended to be the test page for everything minor. Anytime, an editor would like to try something, the Sandbox link can be found at the left of the page in the 'Wiki Tools' sidebar.
Questions/Comments
Please email us for any issues or questions regarding wiki use or advanced wiki editing.
