Help:Editing

This is a general guide on how to construct and edit DDC-I; wiki pages.

Wiki User Names

Please use your fully qualified work email address (all in lower case) as your user name. The wiki will muck with the initial cap, but for odd wiki reasons it doesn't matter.

Media Wiki Markup

If you are going to edit pages, you'll need to know wiki syntax.

Rather than using WikiWackyNames use underscores to separate words in a page title, e.g., Main_Page rather than MainPage.

Rationale: It's easier to read.

When linking to a page outside of the wiki, but on deos.ddci.com, please use {{SERVER}}/foo/bar.htm, or ftp://{{SERVERNAME}}/foo/bar.tar.gz rather than using the hard coded server name.

Rationale: we might change the name of the server.

You can create links to Problem Change Reports (PCR)s and Subversion SVN revisions with the following additions to interwiki syntax:

• Shared IP Bugzilla and Subversion use [[PCR:123]], [[PCR:123#C4]] (refer to a specific comment in a PCR), [[PCRs:1,2,3]](for a list of PCRs) and [[SVNRevision:nnn]].
• DDC-I Bugzilla and Subversion use [[DDCI_PCR:nnn]], etc., and [[DDCI_SVNRevision:nnn]].

Uploading Files

File uploading has been enabled. This permits you to include presentations, etc. directly in the wiki. Please consider placing files in configuration management or more appropriate locations before uploading. Files that represent DO-178B Life-Cycle Data must be captured within configuration management instead of the wiki. Files representing deliverables to the user are delivered via our FTP server, not the wiki, e.g. Deos software distributions containing executable object code and documentation. All other types of files are candidates for uploading, especially if they have relevance to the wiki content that references them.

To upload, use the Upload file link in the toolbox. File names must be globally unique, so be verbose and descriptive. Consider using the project name in front of the file name so we can see what program/project it was used in. After uploading, you can create a link to your uploaded file with [[Media:uploaded-filename|display text]] (the "|display text" is optional). -->

Kinds of pages

Although there are no restrictions for creating pages, we expect the following kinds of pages to exist and follow the same conventions. Look at a Sample_Project to see the format preferred. Feel free to copy the code over and modify it to suit your program, project or product.

Customers

A customer is an administrative organization (e.g., a company or division of a company). There are two kinds of information about customers. The customer generic information (e.g., where the customer is located, good places to stay/eat, directions to the plant, misc info), and program specific information. A customer is represented by a category containing the customer name and ending with "_Customer". One of its categories should be Category:Customers.

Project

If the DDC-I team is doing work, there should be a project page linking to the Product being developed. The primary purpose of the page is for program management data (status, etc.). A Project should be a normal article with a title ending in "_Project". Include the Category:Projects and also the Category:Active_Projects category if appropriate. Suggestion: If there is a project to develop a product, the project should be named productName_Project, e.g., AFDX_Project.

Rationale: including _Project enables us to define a project for a product by just adding _Project, e.g., AFDX vs AFDX_Project.

It is possible to specify a project that describes other projects. For example, one may want to create a project related to the next SDK release, and this project could contain links to projects that need to be accomplished before the release can be made. If this is the case, use "Meta" as part of the project name, e.g. "Antero_Meta_Project".

Product

Products that the DDC-I team produce should have their own page which serves as an index to the other information for that page. Products imply "general purpose", or "multi-use." In other words, Products are intended for use by multiple customers. The ANSI page is a good guide. Note that by convention we don't include "_Product" in the article title for a product (e.g., ANSI not ANSI_Product). One of its categories should be Category:Products.

In general, there should be a one-to-one Product name mapping between the Wiki and Bugzilla.

Categories vs links

A Category is a special kind of page that automatically generates a nice index of the pages that link to it. Every page can generate the list of pages that link to it via the What links here page in the toolbox. Practically what this means is that categories are not really necessary, but they are quite convenient. So, we've decided to use categories for whatever we think are likely to be common user queries, and links for everything else. E.g., we create a category for each customer, but we just create a link to the name of the city where the customer resides, assuming that querying for the things in Minneapolis is less likely than knowing what programs a customer has, or which program is for what customer. The Special:Categories page has the current set of defined categories. If you create a category, you must actually create the page for it, otherwise navigating to that page will open a "edit page". You don't have to put anything in particular on the page, just save it, preferably with a brief statement of what the category is. Note that categories can be quite useful for lots of things, e.g., keeping a list of the pages that constitute the meeting minutes for the project, etc. If you have such things, you might want to consider using "subpages", which are nothing more than a page with a name that contains the name of the parent separated by a "/". E.g., the foo/bar page, bar is the child, foo is the parent.

Customizing Toolbars and Templates

Just visit/edit: navigation box (aka sidebar) or in general one of the templates by visiting the Special:Allpages and selecting "Template" from the drop down box. After changing a template, you sometimes must visit the mainpage with a suffix of ?action=purge to clear the cache. In some situations I've had to put the "?action=purge" on individual pages, but that might also be due to a client side caching issue.