Help:How to add content

From Monitorization of Conflicts in Africa

Adding content in MCA wiki is easy, but it is slightly different from Wikipedia and other wiki sites. This page should help explain things.

Remember, you do not have to register in order to contribute. You can add pages and edit all content on the site even without being registered. Still, we recommend registering (a very quick process) if you're planning to do any significant editing; it's easier for everyone to see your editing history, and to communicate with you if need be.

[edit] Posting info

You can use the "Post info" form as a sort of blog post. With it, you can share all sorts of specialized information concerning military and civil conflicts in Africa (upcoming conferences, new books, interesting articles, relevant news, etc). Let's say you stumble upon an upcoming conference:

«Crisis in the Horn of Africa».
Conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), London, 23 October 2008, Wednesday.
at http://www.rusi.org/events/ref:E48C7BB697BF06/
The Horn of Africa was, and continues to be, Africa’s most tumultuous region. Although the disparate countries 
which make up the Horn of Africa community have made enormous strides in terms of development and investment, 
it is, for better or worse, the conflicts in the Horn of Africa which have focused international attention on the area.
...

To post it, you should first make sure it is appropriate for the site, then make sure it has not been added before. To simply post the new info, click on the Post info link here or on the left side of the page, and enter into the form the following values:

Title: Conference «Crisis in the Horn of Africa», RUSI, London, 23 October 2008

Main URL: http://www.rusi.org/events/ref:E48C7BB697BF06/

Country(ies): Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea

International Organization(s):

Topic(s): Security, Terrorism, War, Conflict Prevention, Conflict Resolution, Piracy

Free text:

Conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), London, 23 October 2008, Wednesday.

Registration and Fee required.

The Horn of Africa was, and continues to be, Africa’s most tumultuous region. Although the disparate countries which make up the Horn of Africa community have made enormous strides in terms of development and investment, it is, for better or worse, the conflicts in the Horn of Africa which have focused international attention on the area.

There are various reasons for the conflicts, including religious, ethnic and political divisions, as well as clashes over resources. The recent Djibouti Agreement may offer hope for the future, but there is no consensus as yet on how the various conflicts can best be resolved. However, there is no doubt about the enormous global significance of the Horn of Africa, which is a strategic gateway to north Africa, the Middle East, and central and southern Africa.

...

When you click 'Show preview', you'll be taken to the preview page for that post. The 'Created by' and 'Date' fields are filled automatically with the current user and time. If everything looks alright, just hit "Save page" to enter that post in the database. That's it! For more details on what's going on, continue reading below.

[edit] Fields

The "Main URL" field is fairly straightforward. As to countries (or territories) and international organizations, there may be some ambiguity here - should it be "Réunion" or "La Réunion", "São Tomé e Príncipe" or "Sao Tome and Principe"? Should the international organization be referred to by its acronym (ex. UN) or by its full designation (ex. United Nations)? Thankfully, the auto-complete feature in the "Post info" form will help fill in values that already appear in the database. If there are no previous entries for this country or international organization, you should look on Wikipedia to see how they are referred to there; general MCA wiki style is to copy Wikipedia's naming conventions whenever possible. If the country and/or international organization don't appear in either MCA or Wikipedia (unlikely), go with whatever name you think makes the most sense. As to international organizations you should always use it's full designation.

You can use 'International' as an entry on the countries field (it stands for any number of indiscriminate countries). It should be used when posting, for ex., about a subject that concerns Africa, generally.

To decide on the Topic, you should use the same methodology described for countries and international organizations: first, see if the auto-complete feature offers a reasonable possibility, then, if that fails, on Wikipedia.

Thanks to the use of forms, all of which are enabled by the Semantic Forms extension, actually adding and editing these pages simply involves filling out form inputs. For an explanation of the various templates used in this wiki, you can go to Help:Template text.

[edit] Refreshing data

You may notice, after adding or modifying a post, that the new post or modified data do not appear where they should appear, in a topic page, country page, etc. That's most likely because the data that appears in that page is cached from before. You can make the new data appear by hitting the "refresh" tab at the top of this page.

This page is an adaptation of http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Help:How_to_add_content.