Help:Contribute
But before moving on to the instructions, an exhortation, don't be too scared by the possible complexity of things, and if you find yourself in trouble let go of the advanced syntax and details, and go ahead writing simple text or inserting images without too many complications. Becoming an expert takes time, and you are not alone, others can help you to complete or refine what you have undertaken. A possible starting point is to go on with the pages just sketched; those are collected under the page "To be finished".
Finally, do not hesitate to ask the administrators of the site (with the address in the contacts) or on the forum associated with it.
Good work!
General indications
A good starting point for writing pages with MediaWiki, the software of this site, can be found in the help pages of WikiPedia. It seems useless to rewrite here what is already treated in an excellent way there. For this reason as an introduction to the syntax of the Wiki we recommend reading the following pages of their Tutorial that illustrate the main operations that can be done with this site:
Specific indications
Beyond the general indications applicable to any type of wiki managed with the MediaWiki program, for the structure of the contents of this site have been adopted some general conventions, which must be followed in order to allow a proper use of its content.
In particular, these conventions concern the methods of insertion and classification of files and the characteristics of the pages of the site. A list of the pages containing the relevant instructions is as follows:
- Help:Upload a file, general instructions on how to upload a file always read before the following.
- Help:Upload a photo, specific instructions on how to upload a photo of pens.
- Help:Upload an advertisement, specific instructions on how to upload an advertisement scan.
- Help:Upload a patent, specific instructions on how to upload a patent document.
- Help:Upload a calligraphy book, specific instructions on how to upload a scan of a calligraphy book.
The same number of specific conventions have been adopted for the management of the pages relating to brands and models, so please consult the pages:
- Help:Brands Pages, instructions for creating a brand page.
- Help:Models Pages, instructions for creating a model page.
- Help:Biographies, instructions for creating an author's biography page.
Conventions have also been adopted for the management of pages related to the classification of celluloid types, and help templates are available, see the pages:
Finally, for certain information used within the pages, specific templates have been created to simplify management and reduce the number of things to write. An example of the various uses of these templates is as follows:
Photo and scan indications
When you have the opportunity to photograph a pen, to illustrate its characteristics, it is advisable to take multiple images; in particular, we recommend the following poses as often as possible:
- Capped/Closed: the pen with the cap closed
- Posted: the pen with the cap on it and the nib exposed
- Open: the open pen with the cap on the side
- Inscr: all the inscriptions and imprints on the pen
- CapSection: close up for cap and section with the nib in evidence
- Ends: the head of the cap and the tail of the barrel
- Extracted: for a safety provide photos with the nib extracted as well as retracted
- FeedCap: the feeder and the back of the cap
For scans of advertising or miscellaneous material remember, when you can know, to note down the following information:
- date of publication
- newspaper from which it is taken (if advertising) including year, number, volume and page if possible
- artist/illustrator, if any
Translations
The wiki uses the translate extension, whose documentation can be found at this address. To start translating a page, you must first mark it for translation by inserting its content in the tags like:
<translate> ... content ... </translate>
at this point you will get the links to mark the page for the translation, and you can start translating (the page will be divided into paragraphs and the translation is done through the interface provided by the extension). Only the pages of the brands and models have to be translated in this way, for the other pages the choice may be different, in particular for the images we write the notes on the same page in more languages (at the moment only Italian and English) while for the pages of vocabulary that have a term in the original language, we have used directly that.
The translation of the sidebar menu is reserved for administrators, the relative instructions, very brief, are given in this page.