Notes for Contributors

From RoguesGallery

[edit] Notes for Contributors

Anyone can read content. To edit page content, add pages, or upload photos, you need to sign up.

• Sign up
  • Open Special:Userlogin in a new window or tab (so you can switch back and forth).
  • Click "Create an account".
  • Enter a user name and password.
    • Please, use your real name in whatever form you would use as author of a published article.
    • Remember your password. No one, not even the ANPC Webmaster, can recover it (although we can, with some trouble and delay, give you a new temporary password.)
  • Contact the Sysop [1] and tell us about yourself and your interest in invasive plants, or, if we invited you, just to let us know you've signed up.
  • Once we have changed your status to "editor" you can make changes to page content, add pages, and upload photos. We'll send you an e-mail to let you know.
  • If you want other users to know more about you than just your user name---who you are or how to contact you---go to Special:Listusers, click your user name, and create a page about yourself.

• Attribution
  • The program automatically tracks who writes what, there is no need to add your name to an editorial change, it will always be recorded in any case, and can be viewed by clicking the "Page history" link.

• Commenting and discussion
  • You can comment on the contents of a page by using the "Discuss this page" link.
  • What you and others write in "Discuss this page" will be seen by all who click that link from the same page.
  • You can make more general comments (relating to the whole subject, rather than a particular page) by clicking the Talk link next to your name when you're logged in. No one will find this, however, unless you also add a link in your personal talk page to the User Talk page.

• Page editing
  • In species pages, some of the fields included are factual, not opinion, judgement, or conjecture, and should not be edited unless clearly in error.
  • Please consider contributing mainly by adding to the remarks, or commenting (see above).
  • If you do delete or change existing material, leave a note in the "optional" field "a note about this edit for the page history log" to say why.
  • After editing a page, preview it before saving it!
  • To start a new species page with same format and features as existing pages, start editing the page by copying the contents of boilerplate to the new page.

• Photos
  • The least satisfactory photos to date have been made by scanning prints. The best source to start with is an original file from a digital camera.
  • Include your name and copyright notice, if you care, in the photo itself (you could add text using Photoshop, and then flatten the image, for instance).
  • use 8 bits-per-channel colour, sRGB colour space, or 8-bit greyscale.
  • 600 x 800 pixels is maximum size(size in inches does not matter).
  • save as medium quality JPG (level 6 in Photoshop. Files should be about 150 kB in size. Much larger files will be automatically rejected. Intermediate files can be uploaded, but only after you respond to an annoying message. If the background is busy, try to crop as closely as possible around the subject.
  • When preparing a photo from a larger JPG, open the file, crop, reduce the size to less than 600 x 800 pixels, add your copyright notice or credit, and save only once. If the result is not satisfactory, don't start with the saved file, start again from the original file.
  • Use file name form "Genuspec_urname_nn.jpg" where first 4 letters come from the genus, next 4 from the species name, "urname" is your name or initials, and "nn" is a unique string. "nn" could be just a sequential number if you have more than one photo of that species, or it could serve to identify the source of the image in your files. For our purposes, it only serves to differentiate photos that would otherwise have the same name.

• Map data
  • If you use a GPS and or otherwise have reliable location data for occurrence of an uncommon species (we don't need to map Smooth Brome) enter your location data on a map references page in format "nn.nnnnnnN, nnn.nnnnnnW" using decimal degrees of latitude and longitude with as much precision as you have (ignoring the number of decimal n's in the given format). In future we hope to add active maps to this wiki, but in the meantime you can plot your own by copying locations from here to Google Maps.