Getting Started

Welcome to the Australian Traditional Music History Archive.

This site is a Wiki, a website that allows users to collaboratively edit it. If you've not used a wiki before, you may want to have a look at the What are Wikis, and Why Should You Use Them? and Wikipedia Wiki pages. More specifically, this site is powered by the Mediawiki software (used on Wikipedia, the Traditional Tune Archive and many other sites).

Using This Wiki

Anyone is welcome to browse the content on this wiki. To find pages of interest you can look at:

• the list of All Pages
• browse pages by their Category tag
• search for pages containing the specified words in either their title or body by using the Search Box in the navigation area on LHS

More on the Wiki Layout and Features

When viewing any page, there are several tabs visible over the main displayed content. The page tabs displays the current page (if you have moved to one of the other tabs here). The history tab shows you a list of changes made to the page, who by, and why. The other tabs are not really useful for most site users.

On the Left-Hand Side of the wiki is a navigation area. This starts with a list of links to useful pages on the site, including links to the Main_Page, All Pages, Browse by Category, Newest Pages, Recent Changes, and finally this Getting_Started page. Next there is search box, where you can enter some text you want to find in either page titles or their contents. Finally there is the tools section with utility links. The most useful of these is the Printable version link to display the current page in a form suitable suitable for printing or saving as a PDF. The other items are not really useful for most site users.

Contributing to This Wiki

Registered Users are able to edit or create pages on this site. User accounts are available upon request to the site managers for collectors of traditional Australian Music. Note that you have a common username and password across the companion history and tunes sites. Once you have an account, you need to login to the site using the login link on the upper RHS. You will then have access to page editing and other site features.

More on the Wiki Layout and Features when Logged In

As a registered user, logged in to the site, you see a number of additional items on the page compared to user's who are not logged in. The general structure is as described in the [[#More on the Wiki Layout and Features|]] section above.

Across the upper right area of the page are a set of links related to you account on the wiki. The first is your login. This links to your personal user page. You should say a little bit about yourself here, to inform other user's of the site. You can also use this page as a place to experiment with wikitext markup and content before placing it in the desired target page on the system. Next is a link to your talk page, where users can leave messages for you. In fact all pages on the wiki have a paired talk page for discussion about them (as we'll note below). That said, you don;t always receive notification of changes to talk pages, so we don't really recommend using them, unless there are several people actively discussing a particular page, who are thus looking for these notes. Following this is the link to your account preferences which you can check and adjust. The remaining links are for your watch list (pages you've said you want to monitor changes to), a list of your contributions to the site, and lastly the log out .

Above the main displayed content, there are now some additional tabs. The discussion tab links to the talk page associated with the current page. As noted above, this should really only be used a by a group debating content on the specific page. The edit tab allows you to make changes to the page, as we discuss below on #Editing Pages. As a page contributor, the history is very useful for seeing who has previously made changes to this page. It even allows you to undo some changes, to revert a page to a previous version. This is usefu|l if someone has seriously mangled the page. This feature should be used with care. The move tab allows you to rename a page. This doesn't delete the original page, but rather leaves a redirection to the new page name. Again this feature should be used with care, but can enable you to correct an incorrectly named page. Last is the watch tab that adds this page to your watch list.

In the navigation area area on the LHS, there are some extra links in the tools section. The Upload file link allows you to upload a file (e.g. image) to the wiki. However this is better done as part of the process of including the image on some page, as described in Lawrie's guide to Getting Started Editing Wiki Pages (see #Editing Pages section next). The Special pages provides access to a suite of advanced site features. These are mainly relevant to site editors and administrators, others should tread very warily!

Editing Pages

To content on a wiki, you Edit the relevant page. This will place you in the wiki page editor. On this site, most pages are free text articles, possibly with links to uploaded images. The page content uses a special markup style know as wikitext. To find out more about the wikitext markup used on these pages, have a look at Lawrie's guide to Getting Started Editing Wiki Pages. There are other links on the Help:Contents page.

Please note that each person adding information to this site is responsible for meeting the copyright requirements for that information.

The usual edit process goes as follows:

• you make some initial changes to the window wikitext content
• you enter a brief "Summary" message that will appear in the page history giving a brief idea of why you're editing the page (which helps other users know what you've been doing on the page)
• you select "Show preview" to see the effect of your changes
• you say "bugger" because its not quite right, so you tweak your changes to the page content
• you select "Show preview" to see the effect of your new changes
• repeat above make change & preview cycle until satisfied with the new page content
• select "Save page" to commit the changes to the page, which others can then view

Your wikitext can include links to other pages on this site, links to external web pages, all done using the standard wikitext link tags described in the references quoted above, or links to tunes in the companion Tunes Archive. Fir the last, you can use the "interwiki" tag "austtradtune" in a link of the form:

[[austtradtune:Name of Tune|Link text to display (usually tune name)]]

Each page that describes someone who is mentioned in tune tags, should have a link to search the Tunes Archive for all tunes referring to them. This should take the form of a page section with the following title and text:

 == Related Tunes ==
 
 You can [[austtradtune:Special:Search/name_of_person|search for tunes referring to name]].

Important: You must replace all spaces in name_of_person in the linked Search page reference with plus signs. i.e. to search for Jane Bloggs use link like:

You can [[austtradtune:Special:Search/Jane+Bloggs|search for tunes referring to Jane Bloggs]].

Every page on this site should be tagged with one or more categories, to assist users of the site to locate pages of interest. A list of existing categories is provided near the bottom of the edit window, just above the "Summary" field. You can just check one or more of these categories to tag your page with. If you are creating a page that doesn't fit in an existing category, then you can explicitly add a category tag to the end of your page content, which looks like:

[[Category:''new_category_tag'']]

Note that as soon as you preview the page, this will be removed, and the new category added (checked) to the list of possible categories for your page.

Please note that this site is not intended as a repository for media files. There is a 2Mb size limit on uploaded files, and its not really designed for managing large media file content. Hence linked media files should be located in some suitable repository elsewhere on the web.

Creating Pages

To create a new page, you should search for it by the name you wish to use. If it does not exist, you will be offered the option of creating the page, which you should select. You will then be in the page editor, and can entered the desired content as wikitext, as discussed above in the section on modifying existing pages. Please note, if you want to add a tune, then you should do this on the companion Tunes Archive.

Enjoy!

Further Guides and Tutorials

For further details, please see Help Contents for a list of additional guides available on this site.