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HowThisWorks

This is a collaborative forum. Registered participants can edit the contents of nearly any page, and are free to create new pages. Structure and hierarchy grow dynamically as new pages and links are added.

A: When you register for the conference, you'll receive a login name and password. Click the "login" link at the top of the page, and fill in the form. Login uses a persistent cookie, which is good until you log out. If you're using a shared PC, please log out when you're done with a session.

Q: How do I edit a page?

A: Once you've logged in, an edit button will appear at the bottom of each editable page. See EditingPages for more information.

Q: What can I do to improve the wiki experience for others?

A: See CoherentlyRewritten.

Q: How do I undo an edit?

A: At present, you can't. This is high on the list of things to fix. In the meantime, please be careful.

Q: How do I add a new page?

A: Choose a WordLikeThis to name the page, then add that word to an existing page. It will appear as an InActiveLink until you click it to create the new page.

Q: How do I make lists or get words to appear in italics?

A: See FormattingConventions.

Q: How do I remove a page?

A: See RemovingPages.

Q: What kind of software is this running on?

A: See AboutThisServer.

Q: How do I discover when someone has annotated my page or my annotation?

A: Read them every few hours, or check frequently to see if they show up on recent changes.

Q: How do I embed images in pages?

A: See FormattingConventions, and note the warning about using 3rd party images.

The Nitpicker claims that when years go by without fixing things high on the list, nobody cares very much. Many problems and shortcomings would be fixed just by converting to using MediaWiki, he said as if it could be done in a single afternoon. Maybe it could if we installed the newer software and made crossing from one to the other pretty transparent. That would be a win for ExtremeIncrementalism. DickKarpinski 2006 Aug 17 (an unambiguous big endian date)

Dick, If you see "problems and shortcomings" about how this site operates, or have suggestions for improvements that would help facilitate discussions amoung AYE participants, please speak up. "Problems and shortcomings" gets my attention, but that lack of specifics, coupled with the vague hint of things left unfixed, leaves me irritated. --DaveSmith 2006.08.18

Sorry, Dave. I was referring to undoing an edit, which is trivial, although not so obvious, on MediaWiki. I consider it the gold standard at this time, athough I always hope for better.

Here is my immediate speak up list, to reduce your irritation:

1. I want to see the history of a page in ultimate detail.
2. I want to have an easy way to revert a page to a former state. The history would retain all versions which were ever created.
3. I wish there were full fledged description of formatting pages. For example, can I make a link to another web site and show only a few words of my choice in the underlined link which shows up on the page?
4. I wish there were a list of features with source and result shown.
5. I wish I could supply a macro in such a way that readers could do some simple thing to get the macro invoked with the page text supplied as one argument. The result would be a link at the cursor location on the current page to a new page defined by the macro. The macro source text would be on an appropriately named page in the wiki and thus subject to continuous improvement as well. The macro might be written in Perl or Python. (I seem to favor languages starting with P although I thought PHP was awful until it showed up as the language implementing MediaWiki.)

I'm warning you, if you give me any excuse to mouth off, I'm likely to do that. I hope to do it in a friendly and cooperative way which seeks to build a better future for all of us on this deeply flawed planet. Did I manage to reduce the irritation? DickKarpinski 20 Aug 2006