User contributions

Anyone is welcome to contribute to this site, by editing existing pages or creating new ones. All you have to do is:

1. Register for a User Account - click the "Log in/ Create Account" link in the top right hand corner of this page.
2. Validate your email address - check your emails, locate the email from Jerripedia with the title "Jerripedia e-mail address confirmation" and click on the link it contains
3. Read this guide
4. Start Contributing

How the site works

This page is designed to get you started in understanding more about the structure of Jerripedia and how you can start contributing to sections where you have particular knowledge to share.

It covers the basic page features, and how to edit existing pages or add entirely new content. It also covers the (very simple) features which help you format pages, and some basic rule about what to contribute.

Unless you already have experience of adding content to a Wiki – Wikipedia, perhaps – it might be best to contact our editor before making any substantial addition or alterations to an established page (no need to do so if you have spotted a spelling error or other typo). Creating new pages also involves linking them to the menu structure, otherwise nobody will find them. This is something which needs to be undertaken by a member of the editorial team, and it helps if they have advance notice and can decide where to place the content in the site.

Although the site is open to anyone to edit pages, and designed specifically to limit the amount of experience and skill needed, it has settled into a well-established pattern since it was launched in 2010. It's thousands of regular visitors are familiar with this and much of the content has stood the test of time. It is also the editors' responsibility to ensure, as far as possible, the accuracy of the site's content.

So before embarking on anything other than a minor edit to existing content it is best to discuss your proposed changes with the editor. To do this please send an email to editorial@jerripedia.org

Guide to Page Features

Jerripedia is made up of a series of articles or pages. Each has a number of other pages associated with it. These are accessed through the tabs that appear at the top of each page with the titles Page, Discussion, Edit, History and Watch.

Page

This is the main content of the article. This is the page that you will see first when browsing the site

Discussion

This is where any discussions take place related to topics raised by the page. For example, any disputes about the accuracy of the content, where there are conflicting points of view, proposals to rename or move the page or any suggestions of how to improve the page.

Edit

Clicking on the Edit tab takes you to the page where you can actually edit the contents of the page. You need to be registered and logged on in order to contribute.

History

This page gives a summary of changes which have been made to the page, on which date and by whom. It is really only of interest to our editors

Watch

If you would like to be alerted whenever any changes are made to a certain page, then click on the Watch tab.

Special Pages

User Page

Once you are registered you can create your own User Page. When you are logged in, you will see your username displayed at the top right of the page. Click on this to get to your user page, which you can edit in the same way as any other page.

Here you can write a little bit about yourself and your interests, but this is entirely voluntary.

Associated with your User Page, are four other pages, which you can access once you are logged on through the links in the top right hand corner of your browser: my talk, my preferences, my watchlist, my contributions.

my talk

This where you can have a discussion with another site user about any aspect of the site. Other users may write messages in your user talk page by editing it, and you can respond.

my preferences

This section allows you to change your email address, password, and control the many different options which control how Jerripedia works.

my watchlist

Your watchlist shows changes made to pages that you have chosen to watch.

my contributions

This page lists the edits that you have made.

Editing an Existing Page

When you have made any changes to an existing page, you should:

1. click Show preview button, to check that there are no errors in the text or formatting. It is better to spot mistakes before you save changes, because you can end up opening the same page time after time until you get it right. For this reason, if you want to change content in several places on a page, do this all in one go, rather than saving after each change
2. add a short description of the changes you have made into the Summary box (just above the Save page button) so that the editor can tell at a glance when reviewing the daily log, what type of changes have been made
3. click Save page

Wiki Markup

Once you are in the Edit page of an article, you can change the text as you would when using any word-processing programs. You will see that the edit pages contain a lot of other characters and symbols - these are used to help format how the text appears in the article. These characters are called Wiki Markup. It is not really necessary to master the use of this markup, unless you intend to become a regular contributor. Necessary formatting can be added when changes to pages are reivewed by editors.

Although you will find a number of accented characters below the Save page, Show preview and Show changes buttons, try to avoid using them. This is an English-language website and accents do not really add anything to content. In most cases they actually create problems because most users are not easily able to include them when conducting searches. Although several Jersey surnames once contained accented characters, few people use them today. A search for Dupre will not find Dupré, and vice versa.

You can use the helpful fractions where they are appropriate in text and the square brackets and == == boxes to insert links and sub-headings. Please ignore all the other formatting instructions further down the editing screen. They are there for the benefit of editors who regularly need to insert templates and other standard text.

Internal links

If you add content and want to create a link to elements of it on other pages in Jerripedia, this can easily be done by surrounding the text with double square brackets.

The text needs to be an exact match for the name of the page you are linking to. Check that links are working when you review the page before saving it. If they show in blue, the link works, if they are red, something is wrong.

Use this feature carefully and sparingly. Don't create a link to a page which does not exist with the intention of creating it later. We don't want pages in the wiki with red links. And don't create an internal link for every reference to the same word in an article - a link from the first occurrence usually suffices. Remember: Before you save a page, use the Show Preview button to check that all the changes you have made have had the desired effect.

Contributing images

We welcome new images to illustrate pages but you cannot upload these yourself. They have to be emailed to the editor, who will arrange for them to be uploaded and positioned where you request. If you want to use an image you have seen elsewhere on the site to illustrate new content you are providing, please ask the editors to do this for you.