Editing iQpedia Articles

The Basics of Editing iQpedia Articles

The pages in the iQpedia are editable. You can add, change, and omit information. However, you must be logged in to edit an article.

Select the article you want to edit. Above any article, you will see three small tabs: View page | Edit page | Page history.

Click the "Edit page" tab. This will take you from the page view to the page editor. A toolbar will appear that is like an editing toolbar in a word processor like Word. From the toolbar, you format text by making it bold, italicized, and underlined. You can also add external links to websites, tables, and symbols.

Linking

External Links

The purpose of external links is to connect to websites outside of DailyCues. Generally, external links should be organized into their own section at the bottom of relevant articles.

To create a link:

  1. Type the text that will serve as the link (e.g., Contact the National Cued Speech Association for more information.)
  2. With your cursor, highlight the portion of the text that will serve as the hyperlink. (e.g., Contact the National Cued Speech Association for more information.)
  3. Click on the link button above (i.e., the symbol of the chain link)
  4. Enter the url. Note that the "http://" is already included. 
  5. Under the "Link Type" be sure that "URL" is selected. This means that it's a website, not an e-mail address.
  6. Once saved, the link will be estalished: Contact the National Cued Speech Association for more information.

To remove a link:

  1. Place the cursor somewhere in the link text.  
  2. Click on the unlink button (i.e., the broken chain link next to the link button) 

Internal Links

Internal links connect the articles we write in the iQpedia. To make an internal link you can just add double brackets around a term. For example, in an article about Dr. Cornett, you might write something like this:

          Dr. R. Orin Cornett developed [[Cued Speech]] in 1966. 

The above link has been specially formatted so you can see the double brackets. Normally, once the article is saved, the llnk will be shown as underlined text (like this: Cued Speech) and the brackets will not appear in the normal view page. The term Cued Speech will now link to an article called “Cued Speech.” If the article already exists, the link will go right to it. If the article hasn’t been written yet, the link will create an invitation to write that article.

Sometimes you may want to link to an article but the term is a little different. For example, if you have the sentence:

          There are more than 40 phonemes in the English language.

If you want to create a link to the definition, phoneme, you cannot simply put brackets around the word "phonemes" because the words are different. To do so, would create a new article called phonemes not a link to the article, phoneme. Instead, type:

          There are more than 40 [[phoneme|phonemes]] in the English language.

In the above link, the first word is the name of the article that will get linked to, the pipe symbol (i.e., | ) separates the terms, and the second term is the text shows up in the sentence. It will appear like this:

          There are more than 40 phonemes in the English language.

When the reader clicks on "phonemes", it will take them to an article called “phoneme”

This may seem complicated at first, but it's similar to how Wikipedia works. You’ll find that it easy to create new articles and that articles quickly get expanded to include new topics. As you read articles, you might simply see a number of terms that should be unique articles. By adding double brackets around the terms, you increase the likelihood that other users will write those articles.

Wondering how we managed to get the double brackets to show up in the examples above?  An exclamation point before the double brackets (e.g. ![[phoneme]]) disables the internal link.  Although this is a feature that will probably only be used in the help section, you may find it comes in handy if you ever want to use double brackets for something else!  Still a bit confused?  Click on the "edit" tab at the top to view the raw text of this page and see how we did it.

Edit Summary

Consider writing a short statement to explain the changes you make to an article. This will help future users to recognize the thought that went into your edit and the evolution of the drafts. Your comments will appear in the Page history for the page. For example you might write:

  • corrected typo
  • fixed broken link
  • added examples
  • expanded the section about CS history

Saving Your Work

When you are all done, you must click SUBMIT. This will save your work and return you to the Page View. If not, your work will be lost.