Revision as of 19:13, 8 August 2016

Getting started on the LinkedEarth wiki can seem a daunting task if one has never tried to edit pages on Wikipedia or other wiki platforms. The LinkedEarth team put together this guide to help you get started with the wiki from uploading a new dataset to property annotation and contributing your expert knowledge. The goal is to make this process as seamless as possible. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the LinkedEarth wiki, please contact us.

Before you start

Getting a Linked Earth wiki account

To contribute to the LinkedEarth wiki, you need to be a member of the LinkedEarth Community. To get an account, use the membership form.

Logging in the Wiki

To log in, just click on the link at top right of the wiki and insert your user/password as shown on Figure 1.

Figure1: Log in form

Create your personal page

The Linked Earth wiki allows to create different types of pages. Personal pages are a special type of wiki pages, and we will use them to illustrate how to create a new wiki page in general. After logging in on the wiki, click on your name. You can find it on the top of any wiki page, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: location of the personal page for a user

Clicking your name will take you to a new page, which you can complete with your personal information, by clicking on any of the "edit options" in the page, as depicted in Figure 3:

Figure 3: editing personal information on your wiki page

And adding your personal information on the form (Figure 4):

Figure 4: form to fill with the user information

After you are done, just hit the "Update" button at the bottom of the page (Figure 5):

Figure 5: editing your personal page on the form.

Exercise: Create your personal page and add a personal website and an "about me" description.

Why we need you

Thanks to the effort of the PAGES2k group, we already have over 600 records ready to be uploaded on the LinkedEarth wiki. However, there are hundreds more of legacy data and new datasets being generated. It would be impossible for a team of three geoscientists to contribute these datasets. This is why we need your help! The more datasets are contributed, the more useful the platform becomes.

Which benefits will you get from using LinkedEarth? All of our datasets are in standard format, ready to be used in a scientific workflow. The workflows can be as simple as creating a map or plotting datasets or using more advanced statistics and spectral analyses. The LinkedEarth team is developing some of these workflows for the community. A standard format also ensures that workflows will work with new datasets being uploaded onto the system.

The LinkedEarth wiki is also a platform where scientific knowledge can be contributed. While we have written some articles to get started, there are still many more that need to be written, updated, or improved!

Where to start

We have put together several tutorial to get you started with the wiki:

• Quick Guide to Editing Wiki Pages: The markup language for all mediawiki sites, including the LinkedEarth wiki, is called "wikitext". It is a bit different from HTML, but the principle is similar.
• Dataset Tutorial: Learn how to upload a dataset onto the platform and edit the various properties.
• Discussion Page Tutorial: The platform has a channel that support discussion of the various terms used on the platform. We have prepared a guide to keep this discussion organized following the standard found on Wikipedia.
• Best Practices: Set of rules when editing a wiki page. This is meant to keep the discussions organized and avoid the multiplication of properties that relate to the same concept.

Searching

There are several ways you can search the wiki:

• You can use the search box in the upper right-hand corned. You can search for the name of a page, or any term that appears in a page/
• Within any article, you can use CTRL (or CMD on a Mac) + F and search for a term on that page.