Class Two

Now that we've learned how to focus in on an article and turn out a decent one, let's expand our vision a little bit. The wiki has all kinds of tools for navigating. Some exist to help you, and some exist to help readers. Today we will learn how to utilize both.

Special pages

Now that you're an accomplished wiki-editor, you should get in the habit of glancing at Recent Changes. This special page displays the most recent edits that have been done to the wiki. It is located at Special:RecentChanges. Go there now.

You'll immediately notice some things. First of all, there are different sorts of searches you can do. Play around with them if you'd like... look at the most recent 500 edits, instead of the default 50, for example. Recent Changes is one of the most useful on the wiki, because it lets you raise your head up and look around and what is going on, in general. Are there new articles? Is someone adding a lot of interesting new information? Is your political opponent making suspicious edits to your own page? All the recent edits show up on Recent Changes, and so it's one of the best places to be.

Each entry shows some specific information. Let's take a look. Here's an example:

(diff | hist) . . TATER‎; 11:03 . . (-126)‎ . . ‎KRI (Talk | contribs )‎ [rollback]

The first link, from "diff," goes to a special page that will show you how this edit changed its target. This can be very useful, rather than trying to figure out just exactly how someone changed a page.

The second link, "hist," goes to that page's history. There, you can see all the past revisions of a page. You can even click on the date on one of those past revisions, and take a look at what the page used to look like. Sometimes the difference is amazing: this is what TalossaWiki's main page looked like on 1 Jun 2012, for example.

The next link shows the page name, of course. After that is the date the edit was made, and then the change in the number of characters in the page. In this case, the page edit subtracted 126 characters from the page. It's impossible to know what really means - it might be a single sentence or it might be the fixing of forty typos - but it does give you a quick guess at the scope of the edit.

After that, you can see "KRI" comes next. That might seem mysterious, but if you've looked at the live Recent Changes page, you've probably already figured out that this is a username of the person who made the edit. After his name are links to visit his talk page (if you want to chat) and a list of his contributions (if you want to see what he's doing).

Finally, there's a link to "rollback." This link isn't particularly useful to us, since it's a quick way to undo all the changes a person has made to that page. On wikis like Wikipedia, it lets volunteers who scour Recent Changes easily undo vandalism, "rolling back" all the silly edits made by teenage boys ("Winston Churchill was a HHAHA BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS"). TalossaWiki has no vandals, of course, because only Citizens can edit here. So you should never need this button.

So that's Recent Changes! Amazing!

Watchlist

There are probably some pages that are particularly important to you. If you are the head of the Talossan Association of Tuber Enjoyment and Revival, for example, you'll want to keep a close eye on the TATER page in case someone accidentally adds some wrong information. To keep track of pages that you particularly like, try using your watchlist. You can find it by going to the top right of your screen, where it says "My watchlist." Go there now.

This page shows you all recent edits made only to a selection of pages that you choose. Right now, it's probably empty. Let's add something. Go to TATER, and look at the tabs at the top-right of the page. Next to "Read," "Edit," and "View History" is a dropdown box. Click on it, and choose "Watch." Poof! Now TATER has been added to your watchlist. If you go to "My watchlist" (also accessible at Special:Watchlist) then you should see an entry for that page, with the most recent edit. Wow!

Maintenance pages

If Recent Changes doesn't show anything interesting, though, and none of your watched articles need attention, then how can you help the wiki? Luckily, the wiki itself automatically generates lists to tell you things that need fixing. Let's go look at some of these lists. Click on "Special pages," to the left.

You'll see a cluttered page with a lot of things. You might want to come back here and explore, later. For now, look at the top section, "Maintenance reports." All of these are special pages created by the wiki to tell you about things that might need maintenance. Let's look at some particular ones now.

• Dead-end pages, on the other hand, is very useful. It gives you a list of pages that don't link to anything else on the wiki. That's a bad thing, because wikis are most naturally navigated by clicking on links, rather than by cumbersome searches. Every page should have some links to other content, to make it easier for the reader. These pages don't. So one thing you could do to help would be to go to these pages and "wikify" them - add brackets around some things like "Seneschal" or "Chancery" to link to those respective articles.
• Orphaned pages is a list of pages that have no incoming links. It's the counterpart to "dead-end pages," above, only this time the problem is that there's no way to even get to these pages - nothing links to them at all! The only way someone could find them would be if they searched for the title. This is very much unwanted. To help, you can find topics that relate to these pages and add a link to them.

Note: When you are making an article, make sure it doesn't end up a dead-end or an orphan!

• Wanted pages is a list of the pages that the wiki needs but doesn't have, sorted by the number of links going to the nonexistent page. So if a page is listed as having "9 links," that means that nine other pages on the wiki link to it - even though it doesn't yet exist! It's a big help to create these pages, because clearly they're important.

Redirects

Sometimes a page on "Wanted pages" is just a different title for a page that actually already exists. For example, if you see that the link Seneschals is red, you might be surprised! But don't worry, we have a page on the Seneschal. Rather than making another article, or tracking down all of the wrong links, the best thing to do is just make a redirect. To do that, you create a page that consists only of this code: #REDIRECT Seneschal. Now, just like magic, anyone who clicks on the link to Seneschals will be sent straight on to Seneschal!

This is a very useful trick. For example, if you go to Fiova, you'll be sent on to Fiovă, because spelling the word without diacritical marks is very common.

There can sometimes be problems, of course. If you look back at the "Maintenance pages" under "Special pages," you can see that there are two special pages about redirects:

• Broken redirects are redirects that are supposed to point editors to another page, but a typo or some other problem means that they point to a page that doesn't exist. Ideally, this list should always be empty. If something is on this list, investigate where the link is supposed to go, and point it to the right place by editing the page.
• Double redirects are not as bad, but a little sloppy. These are when a page redirects to one target, which in turn redirects to a third target. This page should also be empty, and is easy to fix. Just make sure that the first pages points its redirect at the third target, rather than the second. If the "Hare" page redirects to "Rabbits" which redirects to "Rabbit," then just change it so that "Hare" redirects straight to "Rabbit."

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