Help:Editing

From Syscore

Contents 1 Standard terms 2 Local editing tips 2.1 Page titles 2.2 Font formatting 2.3 Checking before saving

Standard terms

• Email / email (not eMail)
• Syscore (not SysCore)
• Webadmin (not WebAdmin)
• WebAuth (not Webauth)

Local editing tips

Page titles

• Don't use an ampersand character (&) in a page title
  • Some wackiness occurs with Apache's Redirection and MediaWiki and it ends up being a Bad Thing ™ (basically, the ampersand gets unexpanded too early on all page accesses OTHER THAN the inital write! So you end up creating a page that can't ever be accessed again. grrr)
• Only capitalize the first word of the title and proper nouns
  • Also applies to section headings
  • Examples:

  "Documentation for admins"

  "Documentation for users"

  "Fixing AFS volumes that fail to backup"

• Try to make the first word a gerund (a noun ending with "-ing"). No need to carry this to foolish extremes, of course.
  • Also applies to section headings
  • Examples:

    "Relaying outgoing email"

    "Fixing AFS volumes that fail to backup"

Font formatting

• Enclose any directory pathnames, executable service names, and short code snippets in <tt> </tt> tags
  • Examples:

    /afs/umbc.edu/admin/bin

    sshd and ftp

    ps -ef | grep foo

• Enclose longer code bits or step-by-step command-line instructions in <pre> </pre> tags. You may also need to enclose the pre-formatted text in <blockquote> </blockquote> tags to align things properly.
  • Example
    • If you klog, then run the mkstaweb.pl script without arguments, it will look like the following:

% klog <user>.afsadmin
Non-null instance (afsadmin) may cause strange behavior.
Password:

% /afs/umbc.edu/admin/afsadmin/mkwebspace.pl
usage: mkwebspace.pl <name> <owner>

Checking before saving

• Always use the Show preview button before saving a newly-edited page. Wiki markup can be a tad unpredictable, so make sure it looks like you expected before committing the changes.