Help:Contents

From KLAMediaWiki

Revision as of 17:39, 26 February 2008

Instructions and help

General

This website is about the activities of the World Social Forums. Many of the activities are one-time events (conferences, workshops etc.) during particular social forums, others span over more than one WSF.

Each WSF activity should have its own page, and each page should belong to at least one of the 21 basic 'books' (the 'basic books' of this WSF library are the 21 actionable themes) and to at least one of the 'chapters' (these are the Social Forums).

On our MediaWiki, 'books' and 'chapters' translate into categories. The 21 Actionable themes form an own category. The frontpage of each Actionable theme should be maintained by a librarian or a team of librarians, who actively and continuously collect information and news from experts and social activists.

To find an activity, click and browse the Actionable Themes (from the navigation bar on the left), or Search for existing pages (articles) with the search-button.

Note that you have to create an account for yourself and login to the site, if you intend to amend and edit the pages, or add new pages. Use the links in the upper right corner to register and login.

Editing pages

An edit toolbar is automatically displayed with the edit box, once you have clicked on "Edit". The edit toolbar is explained at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Help:Editing_toolbar . More generally, we recommend Wikipedia's tutorial on How To Edit A Page and Wiki Textbook's Using Images Tutorial.

How to create a new page? When you are ready to start creating the new page, type its Title in the search-field under the navigation bar (left), then press the Go-button. You will be taken to a page with a link to editing the new page, if it does not yet exist. The title of a page should be, or be based on, the name of the activity.

Adding Category-tags

As noted above, each page should be included in at least two categories.

To include a page in a category, add this kind of tag at the bottom of the page:

 [[Category:Name of category]]

The tag will be automatically rendered as a link.

Here is an example of what you may enter to relate the page to a particular Actionable Theme and a particular Social Forum:

 [[Category:Debt, taxation and public finance]]
 [[Category:Nairobi WSF 2007]]

You may add more than two category tags to a page, and you may create new categories. To see a list of the existing categories, click on the word "Category" in a category-link. Read more about MediaWiki-categorization in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization

Convert documents from Open Document Format (.odt) to MediaWiki

You may use the open source software Open Office to convert long and complex documents to Wiki-format, but first you need install the appropriate export filter into OpenOffice.

Download the filter and read the istallation instructions here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Odt2Wiki

In this way you may, for instance, open a MS Word document (.doc), save it as ODT, and expert it to a text-file with wiki markup through the Odt2Wiki-filter.

Wikipedia and the WSFLibrary website

Despite its being the most extensive general encyclopedia that ever existed, Wikipedia does not cover or present the activities of the Social Forum, which is the special purpose of this site.

We want to encourage you to contribute pages and add information about civic organizations, social movements and personalities - to Wikipedia! Articles in Wikipedia and/or the websites of the same civic organizations, social movements and personalities can always be linked to WSFLibrary when needed.

Archives of the Social Forums

In addition to building and maintaining this online library on the activities of the WSF, we have started to build collections in public libraries or archives of the physical documents: texts, speeches, leaflets, booklets, photos, posters etc. from the social forums. East African librarians, for instance, plan to make their collection available via a new and proactive public library in Nairobi. The physical documents are then to be linked to (in case they exist as datafiles, or have been scanned) or referred to on the pages of this website.