Contribution Guidelines
Black Dogs & Yellow Birds is an open Wiki, which means that anyone can edit and update the content of the website. The theory is that this will allow the site to develop and grow more quickly. If you notice a new Simon Joyner interview, hear some news, or feel like typing in some song lyrics, please have a go at updating the site yourself. This page contains some basic instructions and a link to further documentation. [dissertation writing]
Editing a Page
You can edit any page by selecting Edit from the Action drop-down list. The content of the page will then be displayed in a textbox allowing you to edit it. The content is written in plain text with some special rules to govern formatting. The most common of these are:
- Surrounding text in "==" creates a sub-heading.
- Starting a line with : indents the line
- Starting a line with * creates an entry in a bullet point list
- Starting a line with # creates an entry in a numbered list
- Ending a line with `\\` creates a line-break instead of a new paragraph.
- Writing an entire URL, including the "http" part, creates a hyperlink.
When you are finished editing the content, you must type into an input box a sequence of five characters that will be displayed at the top right of the page. This is a security measure to prevent spam content from being inserted automatically. After this you can click the Save button to save your changes. You can also preview your changes beforehand, by clicking the Preview button.
If you would like to try out editing a page, please experiment with the Sandbox page. Once you are confident, feel free to begin updating the main pages of the site. A good way to learn more about the formatting rules is to look at the content of other pages on the site, by clicking the Edit link but not making any changes.
Black Dogs & Yellow Birds is built using the WikiTikiTavi software. Further documentation about formatting rules, including how to produce tables and reference images, is available here:
Adding a new page
To add a new page, first edit the page that you want to link to your new page. For example, to add a new song lyrics page, first edit the page for the record containing the song. You need to insert a new WikiWord, which will link to the new page.
A WikiWord is a specially word within the page content that tells the Wiki software to create a link. There are two forms of WikiWord:
- ((Free Link)) - A sequence of words surrounded by double brackets.
- StandardWikiWord - a sequence of words, each starting with a capital, squeezed together by removing the separating spaces.
The ((Free Link)) form is preferred in the Corduroy Suit and should always be used unless there is a good reason not to.
So, for example, to add the song lyrics for Fearful Man, you would edit the Beautiful Losers page, and change the song name from:
- Fearful Man
into:
- ((Fearful Man))
And also make the same change on the Lyrics page.
When you save your changes, you will notice that the WikiWord that you inserted is displayed on the page with a "?" link afterwards. You must now click on the "?" link in order to create the new page. This will take you to a page allowing you to add the content for the new page. Once you are finished, save the content, and your new page will be added to the site.
Naming Conventions
WikiNames must be unique, so some care must be taken with naming. The following conventions should be followed:
- The WikiWord for song lyric pages should be the full song title. For example, ((One For The Catholic Girls)).
- The WikiWord for a discograpy title page should be the full record title unless the record title is the same as a song title. In this case, add the word "Single" or "Album" or similar to the end of the TwikWord. For example, the One For The Catholic Girls single WikiName is ((One For The Catholic Girls Single))', while the song lyrics name is ((One For The Catholic Girls))'.
Please feel free to add new naming conventions here as and when new types of page are created.
Further Documentation
The full documentation for WikiTikiTavi is available here: