An Article Start to Finish: Using Links in MediaWiki

2007-03-07T16:53:39Z

Week 4

1 Learning Objectives
2 Introduction to the Lesson
3 Demonstrations and Learning Activities
4 If you want to learn more

Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson the participants will:

Use the MediaWiki editing toolbar to markup internal links
Use the MediaWiki editing toolbar to markup external links
Use the National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NALT) to select appropriate category keywords
Use Wiki-markup to add categories to an article

Introduction to the Lesson

Links are what make the World Wide Web work. This lesson is about "connecting" your content to other resources, and because that is what the Web is all about, it is perhaps the most important session of this seminar. When we're finished with this next set of activities your article will become much more "interesting" as it joins a community of other hypertext-related information.

Demonstrations and Learning Activities

Adding Links to Internal Sites

Your content right now is a stand-alone piece of information. As you continue to write new content, and invite your colleagues to join you, it is only a matter of time before you will want to begin tying that content together. The most important way to provide "context" to your article is to provide links within your own site. To do this you use MediaWiki internal links.

Screencast 1: Creating Links in MediaWiki - internal - (Transcript: Creating Links in MediaWiki - internal)

Hands-on Activity

After watching the screencasts on Creating links in MediaWik put an internal link to your article from your User page.
- If there is another participant in the seminar writing something related to your article create an internal link from your article to their page.

Step-by-step guide to Creating Internal Links in MediaWiki

Creating External Links

Linking to relevant content on other sites is what the World Wide Web is all about. You want to include links to important reference sites at every opportunity. It makes for better Web content and it helps guide your readers to sites that you have vetted as having appropriate and well vetted information.

Screencast 2: Creating Links in MediaWiki - external - (Transcript: Creating Links in MediaWiki - external)

Hands-on Activity

Add relevant external links from your article with appropriately described anchor text whenever possible.

Step-by-step guide to Creating External Links in MediaWiki

Linking your Content to a Category

Screencast 3: Creating Links in MediaWiki - categories - (Transcript: Creating Links in MediaWiki - categories)

Hands-on Activity

From the National Agriculture Library Thesaurus select at least one appropriate keyword for categorizing your article.
After deciding on keyword(s) place your article in one or more appropriate categories.

Step-by-step guide to Creating Category Links in MediaWiki

If you want to learn more

Basic Media Wiki Markup

Wiki-markup is describing the content. You don't need to know HTML to work in the wiki, but there are differences between entering content here, and entering content on a word processor. For example, in a word processor you may simply select a different font, but we do it a little differently in a wiki.

Internal link

For example, edit an article, put brackets around specific words, add the summary statement, and save it. If you look at the article again the specific words you bracketed are red, which means it's a blank document. If you click on the link it takes you to an edit page and you can type an article, and save it. Then if you go back to the original article, the words are now blue because it's a real article.

External link

Adding an external link is mostly identical to creating an internal link. The difference is that it only has one bracket instead of two. A link to an external site will be marked-up as follows: [http://www.extension.org Home page for the public Web site for eXtension]. There is also a difference in how you add the anchor text. There is no | between the text for the link and the text for the anchor text. The brackets part is easy if you use the icons at the top of the edit box to add the link. The easiest way to add the actual link is to copy and paste it from the navigation bar at the top of your Web page. This is a place where using tabbed browsing will make your life much easier. If you aren't using tabs this would be a good time to explore how they work. You'll need Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 to use these.

Categories in the Wiki

Why You Use Categories

Looking at wikis there are no menu style navigations to lead you to the various parts. There is some navigation used to lead you to categories. Categories help you find content in a particular area of interest. Additional things will be talked about another day, such as how categories are used for dynamic pages or special pages, or how new content has been added. The bottom line is that article should be in at least one category in the wiki.

How to use Categories

Some categories have --Gholmes 11:51, 7 March 2007 (EST)already been defined, the top level categories are based on the National Ag Library Thesaurus (NALT) each CoP has one top level category that has been identified by NALT and other categories that fit the content area are being defined and the communities of practice are working on those. What makes a good category? Based--Gholmes 11:53, 7 March 2007 (EST) on the wikipedia definition, if you can write a few paragraphs on the category to explain it, if you have an article it should be obvious as to why the article belongs in the category. Placing something in a category, [[Category:horses]], we'll learn more when we do a demonstration. Articles can be in more than one category, there may be a couple different things that identify the subject of an article, can also be sub-categories (beyond what we're doing today), article must be in at least one category.

What can you do now that you know how to do this?

We want every article, resource, image, video, everything that's in the wiki to be in a category otherwise no one knows it's here. Go to Special pages, there are a lot of things there, one is uncategorized pages, go to uncategorized pages and look at list, there are a lot of pages that have never been placed in any category. If you're looking for a job to do in the wiki consider keeping your eye on this page and helping out with categorization.

Watching: An Article Start to Finish: Using Links in MediaWiki

An Article Start to Finish: Using Links in MediaWiki

Contents

Learning Objectives

Introduction to the Lesson

Demonstrations and Learning Activities

Adding Links to Internal Sites

Hands-on Activity

Creating External Links

Hands-on Activity

Linking your Content to a Category

Hands-on Activity

If you want to learn more

Basic Media Wiki Markup

Internal link

External link

Categories in the Wiki

Why You Use Categories

How to use Categories

What can you do now that you know how to do this?