Help:Contents
From CGAFaq
This is an overview of the wiki FAQ for comp.graphics.algorithms, and a brief guide to how to contribute.
Contents |
What is a wiki?
The name wiki comes from the Hawaiian “wiki wiki”, meaning “fast”. More background is available at Wikipedia, a wiki encyclopedia. There are now many wiki sites, both public and private. The intent of this site is to shift the burden of maintaining and extending a FAQ off the shoulders of a single individual and onto the shoulders of the cga community.
Must I log in?
It is not necessary to have a username nor to log in to read pages, nor even to edit. However, there are benefits to doing so, both for the individual and for the community.
How can I contribute?
Across the top of content pages, usually on the left side, are a series of “tabs” with labels like help, discussion, edit, and watch. Selecting the edit tab brings up a page with the “source” for the full current page, in wiki syntax. Often it is preferable to edit only a small section of a longer article, for which there are individual edit links. Each page has an edit history, so we can see who added, removed, or changed what, and when they did it. This also allows us to "revert" mistakes, restoring an earlier version.
To test editing and the effect of wiki syntax (see below) lease use the Sandbox.
Naming new articles
The policy for naming is intended to help searches, linking, clarity, and appearance.
- Names of articles should not be capitalized except for words (like Bézier) that are always capitalized. A quirk of the wiki software forces the first letter to be uppercase, but links will have that corrected automatically.
- Bézier curve, not Bézier Curve
- Singular names should be used unless the word is always used in the plural.
- Bézier curve, not Bézier curves
- If apostrophes must be used, use the “curly” version, Unicode U+2019 [RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK] (’), not the straight one, Unicode U+0027 [APOSTROPHE] (').
- Euler’s identity, not Euler's identity
- Do not begin a title with “The” or “An” or other such parts of speech (called articles).
- Bézier curve, not The Bézier curve
- Expand abbreviations and acronyms unless the abbreviation is always used. Redirect pages can be used to help searches.
- Singular value decomposition, not SVD
- When a title has two or more meanings, requiring different writeups, place a notice at the beginning to help readers choose the correct one, and append a parenthetical term in the title.
- Orientation (topology) and Orientation (geometry) would distinguish a discussion of left-handed versus right-handed from a discussion of the effects of rotation.
- Prefer short titles.
- Bézier curve, not Discourse on the uses of Bézier curves in computer graphics
Prefer American English
The computer graphics community, being international, brings different language expertise and conventions. For the sake of consistency, in this wiki the preferred spelling, syntax, punctuation, and so on is that of standard American English. Thus write “colorize”, not “colourise”; write decimal fractions as “3.14”, not “3,14”; and refer to trucks, not lorries. However, place punctuation inside quotation marks if and only if it belongs to the quotation. One cross-pond difference is easy to avoid: instead of “maths” (British) or “math” (American), always write “mathematics” (universal). These are not absolute rules, but guidelines for the benefit of both editors and readers.
Wikipedia provides more information about the differences between English language conventions.
What is wiki syntax?
To make wiki editing easy for a wide audience, pages are not written in XML or HTML, but in a special “wiki syntax”.
Unicode
The first thing to know about wiki syntax is that text character encoding is UTF-8 (Unicode), so that we can use nice typography like dashes (—) instead of hypens (-), “curly quotes” (foo’s) instead of straight quotes (foo's), letters from other alphabets like aleph (א), phi (φ), and Ya (Я) so that we can write Bézier instead of Bezier, and mathematical symbols so that we can write u×v instead of uXv. Character entities in numeric form are also acceptable.
Emphasis
Next on the list of common syntax is emphasis, using straight single quotation marks multiple times. Thus ''foo'' produces foo, and '''baz''' produces baz. Buttons to produce such effects should appear above the top of the edit region.
Links
We encourage articles to link to other articles within this wiki. The syntax [[quaternion]]s produces a link to the article named in the brackets with the trailing “s” blended into the referring text: quaternions. The link is shown in red if the article does not exist. When the article has a different name than the words used in the text, a more elaborate syntax is available: [[quaternion|Hamilton’s discovery]] produces the same link as the previous example, Hamilton’s discovery.
External links are also possible, using single brackets. Thus [http://www.diku.dk/publikationer/tekniske.rapporter/1998/ Quaternions, Interpolation and Animation] produces a link to an external Web page, like so: Quaternions, Interpolation and Animation. If possible, collect external links at the bottom of a page in a section entitled “External links”, rather than interspersed within the body text.
Paragraphs and lists
Paragraphs should be entered without internal line breaks. Use explicit newlines to separate paragraphs. Indentation is produced by using one or more colons at the beginning of a line; thus a line beginning “:Look, I’m indented!” would produce
- Look, I’m indented!
Also possible are bulleted and numbered lists, such as
- Item the first
- Item the second
- sub-item
- and another
- Item the third
produced by beginning lines with “#” and/or “*”.
Unformatted text
Any line beginning with a space is reproduced “as is”, often useful for code snippets. For example,
fun factorial 0 = 1 | factorial n = n * factorial (n - 1);
Mathematics
Of special interest is the availability of (a limited subset of) LaTeX syntax for mathematics, such as <math>-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}\over 2a</math>, which produces
Displayed equations should be indented by beginning the line with a colon.
The MediaWiki handbook provides more information about editing mathematical formulae.
More help
A great deal more information about wiki syntax can be found elsewhere on the Web.
Also, just below the editing region is a link to Editing help.
| This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism. Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection. |
