This is a quick-start guide for creating content for the Human Condition wiki.

Read Style for guidelines on the style and substance of content that you create.

Click here to register as a new user. You'll need to come up with a username, which should contain just letters and numbers (no spaces or punctuation.) Your login will be created with a random password, which will be mailed to you. Click the login button in the top toolbar and log in with the username and this password. You can change your password using the “Update Profile” button in the top toolbar.

The easiest way to get started is to change an existing page. When you're reading a page, you can click the “Edit this page” icon in the top or bottom toolbar. This will open the edit window. Make your modifications, then click the save button. Be bold about making changes—if you mess up, we can always roll back to an earlier version.

If you want to get fancy and add formatting or links, you need to learn some of the formatting syntax. The icons at the top of the editor box insert various kinds of formatting. You can use the “Link wizard” (chain link icon) to insert links to existing wiki pages.

Links look like:

[[namespace:page_name]]
[[books:black_swan]]

If the linked page is in the same namespace you can omit the namespace. To link to the Wikipedia article “Stephen Jay Gould” use:

[[wp>Stephen Jay Gould]] 

You can link to any arbitrary URL also:

[[http://www.ted.com/]]

but follow the Style guidelines to avoid creating broken links or undesirable spin.

First, choose the name of your page. Users usually don't see this name, but it is the tag used when creating links to the page. The page name is all lowercase and contains _ instead of space, and we also drop “the” and other noise words. Page names are organized into Namespaces, which are similar to folders. The sidebar normally displays a namespace browser. If you click on “books” it will expand and show all of the pages in the “books” namespace.

The easiest way to create a new page is to log in, then type the desired page name into the search box at the top of the sidebar. Something like: “analysis:my_topic”. When you do the search it may throw up some search hits, but if there is no similar existing page, click the “create this page” icon in the top or bottom toolbar. This opens the edit window.

The new page will automatically be wrapped with standard formatting appropriate to the page type. Edit this as necessary, checking that the first heading (the pretty page name) is what you want, and replacing the sample tags with actual tag names. Then click the “save” button on the editor window to save the new page.

The name of your homepage is wiki:user:username:home. Replace username with the user name that you use to log in to the Wiki, for example wiki:user:ram:home. Create this page as described in the previous section. You'll probably want to add a link to your main web presence, facebook or whatever (and please also make a link from that page back to http://humancond.org.)

For your homepage try to highlight your interests related to the Human Condition, but feel free to add other content. Any pages you add that have names beginning with wiki:user:username: are also personal pages. Only you can create or modify these pages, but anyone can read them.

A great way to get started is to review a book. You can also work on a “stub” or “wanted” page in the Todo list.

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