Latest revision as of 07:26, January 18, 2009

When viewing any page on a Our Story, you'll find several main navigation elements:

For Our Story navigation

1. The sidebar on the left gives you access to important pages such as the main page, recent changes, search, help and help.
2. At the top right of the page's main section are links which relate to the page currently displayed: its associated discussion page, the version history, and--most notably--the edit link.
3. In the top of the left sidebar you'll find user links; as an anonymous user, you'll see a link to create an account or log in (they are the same page). As a logged-in user you have a collection of personal links, including ones to your user page and preferences.
4. The right sidebar contains the toolbox, with links to help with the pages being views, special pages, and uploading files.

At the bottom of the page, you'll see a site map, with relevant links to Our Story pages, WSU, Washington State Magazine, other WSU departments.

Below the header are links to Washington State Magazine sections: Discovery, Coordinates, and WSU Researcher. On the right of that navigation bar are links to the magazine and the WSU homepage.

Toolbox

The toolbox contains a selection of links which change depending on what type of page you are viewing.

On all pages (except special pages):

• What links here takes you to a special page that lists the pages on this wiki which contain a link to the current page. This is helpful when you are looking for pages of related information. The What links here information can also be useful when you are refactoring wiki pages and need to check whether links to this page are still relevant after changes in the current page.
• The Related changes tool lists all recent changes in the pages linked to from the current page. Recent changes to all relevant template pages are included in the resulting page list. The "Hide minor edits" option that can be set in the user preferences applies, among other things, to Related Changes.

On all pages (including special pages):

• Upload file displays a special page that allows logged-in users to upload images and other files to the wiki. Uploaded files can be linked from or embedded in wiki pages. Uploading files, viewing files on the server, including them in wiki pages and managing the uploaded files is discussed in the managing files section of this manual. This is not displayed if file uploading has been disabled or not enabled in the first place.
• The Special pages tool lists the Our Story special pages. A special page is one that presents information about Our Story and/or allows access to administration activities. For example, a list of users registered with Our Story, statistics about the wiki such as the number of pages and number of page edits, system logs, a list of orphaned pages, and so on. These special pages are commonly generated when the special page is loaded rather than being stored in the wiki database.

User Links

The user links are displayed at the top of the left sidebar. These tabs allow the logged-in user to view and edit their user page and preferences. Additionally, the user links allow the user to quickly access their contributions to Our Story and logout.

For anonymous users the user links is replaced by a link to the Our Story login page or, if enabled, a link to your IP address and your IP address's talk page.

• <username>

This links to your user page which is where you can put information about yourself, store bits of information you want to remember or whatever else you fancy.

• my talk

This links to your discussion page, where people can leave messages for you.

• preferences

Allows you to change your personal site preferences.

• my watchlist

A list of all pages that you are watching. Pages can be added to this list by clicking watch at the top of the page.

• my contributions

A list of all contributions you have made to Our Story.

• log out

Click this link to log out of Our Story.

Searching

The quickest way to find information in Our Story is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a Search box with a crimson double-arrow button beside it.

Put your keyword in the searchbox, then click the arrow.

If you clicked 'search' and the page you were looking for did not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that matched your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).

How it works

Here's how the search works:

• Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click 'edit', not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
• Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. e.g., if you enter "Bryan Hall" it will return pages that contain "Bryan" and "Hall."
• The search is not case-sensitive, so "OurStory", "ourstory" and "OURSTORY" all give the same result.

Restricting the search

If you click the 'Search' button without filling in anything, you will be taken to 'Special:Search' which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list)

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g., only search within the 'Talk' pages. Tick the namespaces you require for this search.

By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the 'search' section of user preferences.