Contributor's FAQs
From SPARK
CONTENTS
Understanding Categories in SPARK Documents
- Internal links within SPARK
- Link to a section within a document
- Link to section in another document
- Redirects
- External links
- Link to PDF files
- Changing the Sort Order for a Title
- Changing the Title of a Page
- Hyphenation and Spelling of Common Words
- Indentations and Lining up Second Address Line
- Adding Accent Marks and Other Diacritics
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Understanding Categories in SPARK Documents
The SPARK website takes advantage of MediaWiki categories. You can learn more about SPARK Categories by reading the help page. If you want to put your new articles into the right categories, read the Rules for Adding to Categories article. If you are not confortable with adding category labels, the SPARK staff will put the appropriate category labels during the normal review cycle.
Adding Links to Documents
For helpful formatting tips on linking, other than what's mentioned below here, click here
Internal links within SPARK
If you want to link to another page named Whatever, you would type two opening square brackets before the page name and then two closing square brackets after the page name.
Here's a link to the page, [[Whatever]].
If you want to make a link point to a different place you can use a piped link. Put the link target first, then the pipe character "|", then the link text.
*[[Share | Sharing your experiences]] *[[We Need Your Help | Ways to help improve the SPARK website]]
looks like:
Link to a section within a document
1. If you want to link to "sub-heading" place the following at the point where you want to link from:
#sub-heading
Madelyn's attempt:
If you want to make a link between words, phrases, and headings, attach a pound sign (#) to the front of the first word in the parent link, enter a space, vertical bar, and space, and then repeat the word or phrase but without the pound sign. Put two square brackets around this whole thing.
If you are creating a table of contents, please call it "Contents" to avoid confusion with real tables. Put Return to Contents at the very end of the section that you linked to, and that will allow a way for people to easily return to the top of the "Contents."
The following is an example of linking between Section 2 in the "Contents," and the actual Section 2 further below it. (To make Section 2 stand out for this example, there are no links for the other sections--1, 3, or 4.)
== [[#CONTENTS | CONTENTS]] ==
Title of Section 1
[[#Title of Section 2 | Title of Section 2]]
Title of Section 3
Title of Section 4
Further down:
=== Title of Section 2 ===
This is a place for a paragraph(s) pertaining to Section 2. The line below returns us back to the "Contents" at the top of the document.
[[#CONTENTS|Return to Contents]]
Link to section in another document
If you want to link to a sub-heading of another document and not the top of the page, do the following:
1. At the point where you want to link to, save the exact text as it appears on the page and the sub-heading.
2. At the point where you want to link from, enter the following:
[[page name#sub-heading|text to display on page]]
Redirects
To redirect the user to another page, put # and the word REDIRECT in front of the link. This needs to be the first thing on the page. What comes after that line will not be seen, as all this does is go to the page it is being redirected to.
If you're creating a new redirect, start a new page, write #REDIRECT pagename (or #redirect pagename) at the top of the page, where pagename is the name of the target page. (Don't forget, there are two square brackets both before and after the actual pagename.) If you're replacing an existing page with a redirect, for example after merging a duplicate page, go to the page, edit it, and replace the existing text with #REDIRECT pagename.
#REDIRECT [[pagename]]
Link to PDF files
If you want to link to a PDF file (document), add the following:
[[media:filename.pdf]]
External links
Remember, some users do not have Internet access, making external links useless.
You can make an external link just by typing a URL: http://www.whatever.com You can give it a title: [http://www.whatever.com Whatever] Or leave the title blank: [http://www.whatever.com]
Looks like:
You can make an external link just by typing a URL: http://www.whatever.com
You can give it a title: Whatever
Or leave the title blank: [1]
Changing the Sort Order for a Title
If you have an article that does not sort the way you want in categories, you can edit the article so that it will show up properly. For example, if you have an article, "The Lamb" and want it to show up under "L", there are two ways to make this happen. Add either method to the bottom of the article as follows:
- Enter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lamb}}This will work for all categories. This is the preferred method. - Enter
[[Category:Children's Ministry|Lamb]]
Per the example, this is specific to the actual category where you want to change the sort order.
Changing the Title of a Page
Read the article to gain an understanding of the content. Come up with a title for the article that better describes its content.
Then send your new title to us in an email or by telephone.
- 800-314-4227 (free within USA)
- 704-843-6240
Hyphenation and Spelling of Common Words
We can't guarantee all contributors will be using the following spelling, but we will be working to make these words on the site consistent.
- audio cassette
- audio-visual (Lower case 'v' if used in a title. E.g. Audio-visual Usage in Peru)
- flannelgraph
- flipchart
- Internet
- online
- video cassette
- website
Indentations and Lining up Second Address Line
Sometimes you can just put a colon (:) in front of what you want to indent. If that doesn't line it up like you want, try the following:
Put <br> before what you want to indent or line up. See example in this piece of address template:
|Organization Name= Scripture Union Publishers |Street Address= 207-209 Queensway <br> Bletchley, Milton Keynes |City and State= Buckinghamshire MK2 2EB |Country= United Kingdom
That results in:
Scripture Union Publishers 207-209 Queensway
Bletchley, Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire MK2 2EB United Kingdom
Adding Accent Marks and Other Diacritics
- Go to the control panel on your computer.
- Select "Regional and Language Options."
- Click on the "Languages" tab.
- Click on "Details."
- Click on the "Add" button.
- Click on the down arrow of the "Keyboard layout/IME" box.
- If your computer is set up for English, choose "US International."
- Click on "OK" and "OK."
- Go to the keyboard symbol that's on the right side of your computer's bottom toolbar, and click on "US International."
- Return to SPARK and your editing of a SPARK page.
Working with Tables
The code to enter a table into a document is as follows:
{| border="1"
|+ The table's caption
! Column heading 1 !! Column heading 2 !! Column heading 3
|-
! Row heading 1
| Cell 2 || Cell 3
|-
! Row heading A
|Cell B
|Cell C
|}
The resulting table is below:
| Column heading 1 | Column heading 2 | Column heading 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Row heading 1 | Cell 2 | Cell 3 |
| Row heading A | Cell B | Cell C |
Notes:
- If you do not want to have a border around the table, change to "border="0"
- If you do not want a caption for the table, remove "|+ The table's caption"
- If you use exclamation point (!) it becomes a heading with darker type
- If you use a pipe (|) it is still a heading, but not bolded
- To start a new row, use "|-"
- You have a choice of formats for rows: see Cell 2 & Cell 3 vs Cell B & Cell C (If you have a lot of text, you may want to type it the second way.
- If you want to specify cell widths, start row with width="50" (pixils) or width="30%" (percentage)
- Example:
|width="50"|Cell B
Working with Templates
Templates are a way to keep multiple documents looking the same without expending painstaking effort. The advantage is that you can change the format of all documents using the template by changing only one document, the template.
The template document normally does not change; only the documents using the template change. Here are the steps to creating documents using templates:
- Enter the title you want for the article in the Search box. Click on "Go". If the article does not exist, click on "Create this document" link. Otherwise, change the title to a unique one and repeat the this step.
- Go to the Edit buttons on top of the editing screen. Click on the "SB" button to add the Side Bar to the right side of the document.
- Go to the Edit buttions on top of the editing screen. Click on the appropriate button for the template you need. The "PT" button is for the Product Template. Use the "PT" button for reviews of videos. The "ST" button is for the Case Histories or Impact Stories Template. The "ET" button is for the Equipment Template. The "OT" button is for the Organizations Template.
- To fill out a template, enter your information after the equal (=) signs. You can enter multiple paragraphs if you want to. The information before the equal (=) signs are the headings under which the information will appear. Please do not change these headings.
Putting a Table within a Template
There are two instances when you might want to add a table within a template. The first is when you want to compare information in a text table. The second is when you want to include multiple images side-by-side with captions See images below. Since tables and templates in MediaWiki use similar formatting characters, "{", "}", and "|", the program gets confused when both are present. There are, however, two steps to work around this problem. First, create a new template file for the table. For an example of this, look at the file template:Speakers. The contents of this file is an ordinary MediaWiki table. The second step is to include the call to this file from within the main template file at the appropriate location. The code for this looks like
{{template:Speakers}}
you can see the final result of this example, Computer Speaker Comparison 1.
