Project:Editing policies

Thanks to our many contributers this wiki's content is growing day by day.

To grant easy access to further new users and to keep the content of the MPDL CoLab wiki organized, please respect the following editing guidelines.

Who can contribute?
MPDL CoLab follows an open editorial policy, so everybody is invited to contribute information related to activities in eScience. Read-only access is possible for most of the content, even if you are not logged in. If you want to edit articles or create new ones, you need to be logged in. If you don't have a user account, you can create one within a few minutes.

Note that reading and editing of some pages is restricted to members of certain user groups. Assigning user accounts to these user groups can only be done by administrators. For further information see the section Access restriction on this page.

A few other functionalities can only be done by administrators, e.g. editing the basic navigation bar on the left hand side or deleting pages.

What content?
The CoLab pages represent work in progress for various activities related to eScience and MPDL. CoLab is envisioned as an open platform for community building and knowledge exchange, thus it is not the right place for internal documents and authoritative information. If you are not sure if CoLab is the right platform for your contribution, read more about the Purpose of CoLab.

Except where otherwise noted, all content in this wiki is licensed under a CC-BY License. Please know what this means before editing.

Collaboration
Pages will be built, designed, edited, reworked and deleted within community, i.e. there won't be an official "editor" for a specific page. Thus, CoLab is not the appropriate place for documents with an authoritative character.

No vandalizing!
Users vandalizing this wiki will be blocked.

How To
General information on MediaWiki syntax basics are available at Wikipedia (in English) or in our Warming Up (in German or English). To test the system, please use the Sandbox.

Language
Contributions can be in English or German. Please have in mind, that contribution in English might reach a bigger audience.

Page Naming
When creating new pages, please consider following naming conventions:
 * project/solution specific pages should include a reference to this context in its title, i.e. PubMan Submission instead of Submission
 * whenever dates are part of page names, they should be encoded in a way that sorts well lexicographically, i.e. not 22102007 but 2007-10-22

Categories
Editors of this wiki structure their content with the MediaWiki software feature of categorization. This is an easy way of indexing content. To make your contribution not only searchable but actually browsable to other users, please categorize every page you are creating. Learn more about how to categorize a page in our Warming Up (in German) or at MediaWiki (in English). Before creating a new category, please check if your article can (also) be assigned to one or more of our existing categories.

Discussion pages
If you want to make remarks, ask questions or else discuss the content of an article with the other editors, do not add your text directly to the article page. Use the corresponding discussion page (also called: talk page) for this. To access the discussion page, click the link labeled discussion. You will find this link at the top of the page between the article and the edit (or view source) links. If you are contributing to a discussion page, please sign your contribution with four tildes: ~. Adding this signature will automatically add your user name as well as the time and date of your contribution, like this: Tanja 16:26, 2 April 2008 (CEST)

Learn more about the use of discussion or talk pages at MediaWiki.

Access restriction
Read and write access of articles in this wiki can be restricted by editors. This is done by using the MediaWiki extension Group Based Access Control. Learn more about the use of this extension at mediawiki.org (in English) or in our Warming Up.

Before creating a new user group in order to restrict access to a group of users, visit CoLab Usergroups and check if there is an already existing user group that might serve your purpose.

Please note:
 * CoLab has been envisioned to become an open platform for community building and knowledge exchange. Thus, access to content should only be restricted in exceptional cases, e.g. while preparing information packages which are expected to be widely shared sooner or later.
 * The means of authorization provided by this extension are limited (see Security issues with authorization extensions for further details on the limitations).

Edit Summary
To support efficient working with functionalities such as the Recent changes page and the page history, please enter a short summary in the summary line below the edit form before saving your changes. Especially if you are protecting your content with Group Based Access Control you might want to add a summary for security reasons (see Page Summary).