<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

General Business

Between wrestling with legal wordings; figuring out how to fix what I didn't quite get right the first time around in some of the Articles I put up; learning such mind-stretching concepts as Disambiguation, Portals and Projects and otherwise scrambling to get everything looking good before the world at large starts logging in to wander around and play, I sometimes lose track of the fact that there's some great stuff here and that the intention is to make this a Fun place as much as an informative one. Then, I'll stop long enough to actually look at an Article I'm not yet familiar with (there are plenty already and soon I expect they will be, by far, in the majority, and I learn something fascinating and remember why this is worth all the effort.

Formatting

Linking. Links are trickier than you might think, because they seem so simple. Just slap a set of square brackets on anything and it's a link, right? Well, right in one sense but probably wrong, too. I've learned from experience. It can be more than a little annoying when you put a link around a phrase or a title that you know already exists and post your Article only to find that the link is "red" (nothing there) rather than "blue" (correctly attached to what you want it attached to).

The software is very flexible in many ways, but it's also quite rigid in others. Think for just a minute about the difference between "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "To Say Nothing Of the Dog". They look the same, right? Not to Mediawiki they don't. The capitalized "O" in the second version makes it a completely different thing as far as the program is concerned. So, there you are with a link that doesn't link. What to do? Easiest is probably to go and find the Article you want to link to and copy the exact name and paste it into your Article between those double square brackets.

If the situation is a little more complicated than that, tune in tomorrow for some more sophisticated solutions.

Today's shout-out

Peter M. Yet another of the many techies who have put in much time and effort in figuring out how to make this complex and challenging project come to life. I hope they don't mind when I lump them all into that word, "techies." I Love Techies, and Peter is a cool head, a sharp mind, a depth of technical knowledge all rolled into a playful sense of the challenge of the new and the different.

Thought for the day

Rome wasn't built in a day, but a wiki can be built in what seems like nothing more than a few weeks – if you don't mind working flat out round the clock and not sleeping much.