Help:How to start

How to Start on the BRGS Wiki

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Help Section How to start contributing to the project. What can I do to help? What needs to be done? Editorial Guidelines Formatting help Get a User Account The Sandbox Advanced Formatting Signatures Automatic year grouping Wiki Tutorials

First Up

A wiki is a website designed so that anyone can edit it. To keep this site growing, we need contributions from you! You can contribute by editing someone else's work (to improve it), adding to someone else's work (to improve it) or even by adding a whole page yourself!

You'll notice the "edit" tab at the top of the page, which allows you to edit any page you want to, at the click of a button. If you think there's a page missing, you can be very proactive and write a page to fit the bill just by searching for it, and clicking on the red hyperlink with the title of the page.

Even if it's not the best piece of literature you've ever produced, someone else will soon be along to clean it up, add to it, and make hordes of improvements like adding photos and things. We would encourage you to make the effort to use proper English, however!

The sort of pages first conceived for this site are articles on individuals, groups of individuals, clubs, societies, extra curricular activities, and everything in-between. If you think something that's missing from this list, feel free to add to it. It's everyone's site, remember!

A Few Rules

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1. Make it fun! Boring articles can tend to be less useful than slightly amusing ones, but if you feel like you can't be funny about a topic that needs representation, write it anyway and see what people think of it. You might be surprised.
2. Make it informative! Add something that people can use if at all possible. If it's useless but funny, don't be scared, just give everyone a laugh. If you notice a blinding spelling error, take a few moments to edit it out. It'll be worth it in the long run, allowing younger students who get involved to lern how to use gramar an stuff. It may be best not to inform other people about yourself in the article under your own name, to avoid unnecessary embarrassment when someone adds something very revealing to counter your self indulgent soliloquy on how perfect you are. Also, please don't lie, as it doesn't help produce a community atmosphere.
3. Make it pretty! "A picture is worth a thousand words", or so the saying goes. You can embed photos into an article, first by uploading them from the toolbox (bottom left of your page). Simple, yet effective.
4. Make a username! You'll be able to keep a track on all of your edits, and you'll be able to make a name for yourself as a writer and editor of all things BRGS. Also, it makes life easier for talking about pages when people don't agree on the content.
5. Talk to people! Use this site to socialise, and make new friends. If you disagree profoundly with someone's editing or a page they've produced, tell them on the discussion page, and see if anyone else shares your opinion.
6. Edit, but don't vandalise. The lowest down on the list, but most vitally important point: by joining in, you agree to help and not to hinder. If you disagree with someone, tell them, have a debate, improve their work straight off, but don't make a page telling everyone what they got up to last weekend. That's just not cricket.
7. This site is for all ages so write content to suit all ages.

Know what to edit

If you're going to spend some time contributing to and editing the BRGS wiki, you should know what to edit and what will help the most. This is the easy part. You can browse the wiki, find a red link, click it, and fill in some content!

Of course, make sure you have a good idea about what your filling in!

As of the writing of this article, there are 1554 pages that are linked to, but don't exist. These are listed at the wanted pages -page. If you want, you can browse through this and fill some in. Although, that may get a bit boring. However, if we have a task force of, say, 20 people, each contributing one page a day, it would only take 82 days to fill in every single wanted page!

Unfortunately, though, those are not the only pages that require editing. There are also:

0 pages that need some work...
3 pages that need reviewing...
51 pages that are stubs...
0 pages that contain lists which are incomplete...

If these are all 0, nothing needs to be done. But watch out for new additions.

Improve this Page Too

This page isn't perfect, but thankfully, you can make changes to this too.

NOTE: Check here for some simple guidelines that need to be followed when editing!! You can also look at the in-wiki editing help for some simple formatting rules!

Have fun!

Enjoy the experience. If you need some inspiration on what to put in have a look at the wikipedia entry for the White House, but be sure not to be that boring! Don't repeat things though. And whatever you do, don't repeat things, it's boring.

Further Help

• The "wikimedia" website has lots of guidance on how to format articles, and you can edit to view how other people have formatted their articles here.