Project:Wiki Contribution Guide

This page aims to serve as a guide for contributing to the DisNCord Community Wiki. There are some important things to know and guidelines to keep in mind when writing or editing wiki pages that'll help make everyone's lives easier, and keep the wiki clean and organized (and most importantly, consistent!)

Creating Pages

The most important thing on any wiki is the pages. Good quality pages with clear topics are encouraged. If you have any questions, ask!

What should be a page?

Generally speaking, if there's something you know about that's mostly undocumented elsewhere and you want to take the steps to gather information about it and create a solid central source of information, do it! Anyone who's worked with older or more obscure technology knows that sometimes information is lost to time or hopelessly scattered about. Every little bit helps!

If something is your own personal project, it can get a wiki page too. If you've got something concrete and it's generally related to the type of preservation/exploration that DisNCord/Restless Systems tends to dabble in, it's certainly welcome. If you don't know if something of yours should get a wiki page, or if you have any doubts, feel free to ask a mod.

Categorization

MediaWiki features two mostly unrelated category systems. If you're not used to working with MediaWiki-based wikis, it can be confusing to tell the difference between the two.

Namespaces

Namespaces are the first type of category that we use on this wiki. You'll know if a page is namespaced by looking for a prefix in the page title. For instance, this page is in the Project: namespace.

Namespaces are generally used here for specific purposes. Things in the Project: namespace are generally related to the wiki, Mastodon, or Discord themselves, and can be seen as more "meta" articles. Pages in the Category: namespace are... well, categories. There are other namespaces too, such as Help:, but those aren't often used manually.

An important thing to note is that namespaces are not to be used for ordinary pages! The way MediaWiki presents them is confusing, but they are not categories, and namespaced pages don't show up properly in searches, etc. Categories should be used for categorizing pages instead.

Categories

Categories are the primary type of category used for pages. These have no special prefixes or suffixes appended to page titles, and the categories a page uses can be viewed on the right hand side next to the page content (on desktop). Every category should have a landing page in the Category: namespace that serves as an auto-generated directory of pages within the category. See Category:Preservation and Documentation as an example.

To categorize a page, simply add a link to the category page in your WikiText source. For example, adding [[Category:Preservation and Documentation]] to your markup will place your page in the Preservation and Documentation category.

Categories currently in use

[[Category:Wiki Docs]] - documentation relating to how to use the wiki
[[Category:Competition]] - competitions held on Discord or elsewhere
[[Category:Discord]] - pages related to the operation of the DisNCord server
[[Category:Discussion Logs]] - logs of conversations on DisNCord that may have valuable information
[[Category:Fluff]] - fun stuff
[[Category:History]] - history of specific machines, software, or events
[[Category:Preservation and Documentation]] - pages related to preservation efforts
[[Category:OS/2]] - pages related to the ongoing research into OS/2 being performed by User:NCommander and others

Other categories may be added as needed. Please ask before adding your page to a brand new category -- a category with only one page is rarely useful, so ask yourself if your page can fit into one of the existing categories. If enough pages build up that they might need their own categorization, feel free to bring it up in the Discord #wiki-bootstrap channel. (This is why we have an OS/2 category, after all)

Page Etiquette

One key thing to keep in mind in order to keep the wiki organized is the tone and style of pages.

Citation

Remember to cite your sources! Primary knowledge is fine, but cited information is far better. MediaWiki has a citation system that is fairly easy to use, and it's easier to cite as you go, rather than go back and add citations.

Should this be multiple pages?

Consider if the topic you're writing about should be multiple pages. Some topics, such as Research Stream: OS/2 1.0 Explorations make more sense as a large monolithic page. Other topics, such as the OS/2 and MDOS executable formats (Linear Executable, New Executable) make sense as separate articles from the main Multitasking DOS 4 page.

In general, individual topics or technologies should get their own page. This is better for discoverability, and it also makes it easier to reference this wiki properly. Think of it this way: if you're looking for information on an obscure executable format, would you rather look at the page titled New Executable, or an entire textbook titled "OS/2 Internals"?

Style guide

A formal style guide shouldn't be strictly necessary, as everyone has differing writing styles, and not everyone is a native English speaker. However, a few notes:

• Use paragraphs! In general, paragraph breaks should be frequent, and each paragraph should be a separate topic, event, or idea. Look at how Wikipedia does things for a good example. This keeps things easy to read, and easy on the eyes.
• Use sections! Using sections (== Primary Section ==, === Secondary Section ===, ==== Tertiary Section ====) does two things. Firstly, it breaks the page up visually, making it easy to find key information quickly. Secondly, it generates a nice table of contents at the start of the page. This aids in navigation, and makes it easy to link to different sections of the page!
• Write from as neutral of a tone as possible. Think of this as an encyclopedia of sorts. Opinions are welcome, and bias happens, but write objectively if at all possible. We want to present information most of all.

How this wiki is used (licensing)

This wiki is tentatively licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. This is a similar license to the one that Wikipedia uses, and in general, usage falls under the same terms. Any content directly added to this wiki must be released either under the terms of the license, or under terms compatible with it. Essentially, CC-BY-SA states:

• You are free to share content from this wiki as you wish, including derivative works.
• However, any derivative works MUST credit the original author of the work, and MUST be shared under the same license as the work.

Essentially, this means that if you directly take anything from this wiki, the original author must be credited, and your work must also be CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Use of this wiki by NCommander

You can think of this wiki sort of like User:NCommander's project notebook of sorts. Anything written here has the potential to be used elsewhere in a video or a stream, and you're essentially giving permission for them or anyone who comes across the wiki to use the information as they please. Sharing is caring, and the spread of information is always a good thing!

Copyrighted Materials

Being a wiki that often delves into software and hardware preservation, the issue of copyrighted content is bound to come up. Generally speaking, ASK. We cannot host or link to any copyrighted materials in general. (Abandonware is still copyrighted!)

The current understanding is that it's okay to make people aware that such things can be found. For example, saying "here's a link to X and Y on the Internet Archive" is NOT okay, but "you can find X and Y easily by searching on the Internet Archive" IS okay. Mentioning copyrighted content is fine, just don't give too many specifics on acquisition. This follows a similar policy to the Discord server.