HowTo

A wiki is a collaborative web site. Anybody can contribute. Every page has a link at the bottom that allows you to edit it. A good place to create your first page is CategoryHomepage.

• RemoveDefacements explains how to restore pages easily, to get rid of inappropriate content

• UserName has more information on the usernames used on this wiki.

Here are some links (on other wikis) for introductions:

• UseMod:UseMod? is the homepage of the wiki engine -- the CGI script (in Perl) that produces the pages you are reading.

• We mostly follow here, the model of emacswiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HowTo --- from which we have initiated this page.

New Pages

Pages that are expected to be nodes of huge trees can have a name starting with "Category" -- some Categories even have other Categories as children. The main ScaryOctave does not intend to list all categories, nor restrict itself to listing Categories, it merely seeks to list the best and quickest starting points, especially for newcomers.

Text Formatting Rules

Use the SandBox page to test the wiki!

The most important rules are very simple:

• Empty lines separate paragraphs.
• Paragraphs may span several lines.
• Paragraphs begin in column 1.

Links:

• Words in camel case (mixed case) are transformed into local links.
• Plain URLs get hyperlinked.
• Plain URLs that point to images get inlined.

Lists, indented paragraphs:

• List items start with an asterix (`*'). One list item per line.
• Indented lines start with one or more colons (`:').

Source code, examples:

• Lines starting with spaces are treated as source code (we suggest four spaces).

Headings:

• Headings are enclosed in double equal signs (`== Heading ==').
• Subheadings are enclosed in triple equal signs (`=== Subheading ===').

Tables:

• Tables can be created using `|| data1 || data2 || ... ||' to represent one line of table contents.

Some HTML tags are also allowed:

em

Emphasis (usually italics)

i

Italics

strong

Strong (usually bold)

b

Bold

tt

Teletype (usually monospaced)

code

Code (usually monospaced, plus escaping of wiki processing)

pre

Preformatted (usually monospaced, for paragraphs, plus whitespace is preserved, plus escaping of wiki processing)

nowiki

No wiki processing (usually to unlink mixed case words, example: NoLink)

More rules: OddMuse:TextFormattingRules?.

Cross Posting from Usenet

If you crosspost articles from Usenet to the wiki, please ask the original author wether they are willing to license their text under the GNU Free Documentation License (or release it into the public domain).

Naming New Pages

Here's some help for choosing page names:

• If the name is short, such as Sql or Tcl, add "Octave" to front of it. Therefore: example OctaveCode.
• For something as a whole category, such as plotting, you can expect a lot of sub pages. Therefore just make it a category: CategoryGnus.
• If something is an abbreviation or acronym, just spell it out: WThreeM (an emacs package).
• If the page contains your configuration for a specific package, use the suffix -Configuration, eg. OctaveUserConfiguration.
• If the page contains your entire .emacs or similar unspecific configuration code, use your namepage and append EmacsConfig, GnusConfig, ErcConfig, etc. Example: JorgenSchaefersEmacsConfig.
• If you still can't find a good name, just prefix with Octave, as above, or just append "Page". I haven't seen this used on other wikis. They usually use ugly capitalization tricks such as UgLy. Oh well. TrampPage is nice because you can use it to say, "For more information, see the TrampPage.
• We want to replace the Emacs examples above with Octave ones, as and when we get some good ones :)

Add FIXME Tags

If you find that something is wrong, incomplete, or otherwise in need of a tweak, you may want to add a FIXME tag in your comment, so that others will notice that there's something there that needs fixing. There's a canned search on the main ScaryOctave page where you can find all pages which contain this text.

Please don't remove a FIXME comment unless you are actually fixing the problem it describes. If you disagree with a comment that says something is wrong, you should perhaps start a discussion about whether the thing in fact needs to be fixed; you may want to move this discussion the WikiDiscussion page, or create a page of its own if the discussion will have lasting value.

If you want to include the word FIXME somewhere where it is not in fact a "fix this" comment, you can use the "nowiki" tag in the middle of the word to prevent it from showing up in the search engine. (See the formatting rules link, above, or simply open up the editor for this page to see how this paragraph was formatted.)

Deleting Spam

Replace the spam with "DeletedPage".

URL abbreviations

You can find a list of possible abbreviations in the intermap file at http://www.gnufans.net/intermap. It lists supported URL abbreviations and their expansions.

How to Write URLs

If you are referencing the homepage of a package, or link to source files, put the link on a line of its own, prefixed with a bullet:

• http://foo.bar/like.this

This makes external links stand out, and it makes the page printable without losing important information.

Off Topic

Some things are better discussed elsewhere:

For more ideas, see http://www.gnufans.net/intermap.

When to Use Other Media

Here are some general guidelines, which we adapted from emacswiki:

• Documentation which is not part of the Octave manual should go to the wiki.
• Bugs in the manuals should be reported to the maintainers.
• Examples, typical usage, customizations, and code snipplets should go to the wiki.
• Bug reports and bug fixes to packages should be reported to the appropriate maintainers.
• Discussions, questions, etc. usually go to the Newsgroups. I'd like to see more know-how collected on the wiki, but at the moment I think that a lot of the good content comes from USENET postings which get copied and summarized on the wiki.
• Often new content will prompt us to share more of our know-how, or prompt us to ask questions about the stuff posted on the wiki. This should stay on the wiki.

I hope that doesn't discourage people from adding new content. I hope that it shows more or less where our place is in the Octave Information Infrastructure.

Linking to Parent Pages

Some pages have "parent" pages or belong to a certain category. It would be nice to provide explicit backlinks to these parent and category pages. Authors have to add this manually, ie. add the appropriate parent or category tag at the end of the page. The backlinks can be searched for, automatically. Just click on the header to list all other pages linking to your current page. This is just a plain ol' regular search. The reason this is not all automated is because a) it would require the maintenance of a separate link DB, and b) in a double linked graph there may be potentially a lot of irrelevant pages pointing to the current page, so you do not allways want to list them. Thus, the manual strategy of adding category tags or parent pages at the end.

This usually looks like this at the end of the page:

----
CategoryFoo

Including RSS Feeds

You might want to include a RSS feed into your homepage. Here is an example of how to add it:

    <rss "http://purl.org/NET/kensanata/home?action=rss">

Including Online Diaries

If you maintain an Online Diary on another wiki, and that other wiki can show you the raw content of the page, and the text formatting rules are similar to this wiki, then you can just include that page:

    <include "http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=browse&id=AlexSchroeder&raw=1">

Refactoring

Once any discussion on the wiki has died out or gotten old, please feel free to refactor mercilessly, weeding out peripheral stuff, and merging important points into the main text, as you feel appropriate. Feel free to initiate any wiki-related comments or issues on WikiDiscussion.

Using This Material Elsewhere

All material here is FDL'ed (see notice below), which means: Please feel free to use it elsewhere under the terms of FDL.

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ScaryOctave