How To Use The Wiki

How to create a new wiki page
See the MediaWiki Help Contents for documentation on how to use a MediaWiki. For OpenStack wiki, consider always adding a Category to the page, following the taxonomy described below.

Wiki Technology Documentation
This wiki is made with MediaWiki technology and uses the MediaWiki syntax and markup, learn more at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting.

OpenStack is moving fast, so despite our best efforts, outdated content appears on this wiki. This article outlines some ways you can assist in keeping our wiki clean.

Wiki Taxonomy
To make the 350+ pages of the wiki more easily navigable a Taxonomy has been put into place. Adding a taxonomy and templates (coming soon) can help newcomers discover relevant content and find information more easily on the wiki.

How to use the Wiki Taxonomy
In this taxonomy, the OpenStack Wiki is divided into 5 main categories: Connect, Contribute, Programs, Releases, Resources. You can see the full tree on the special page Category:Home

Various wiki pages are linked, and made dependent of, these main categories. When creating a new page on the wiki you can check the taxonomy to see where your page fits in exactly, and make it more easy to find.

To link a page under a category just add this text to the bottom of the page:

Replace "CategoryX" with the name of the category you are linking to.

Finding Old Pages
MediaWiki has some helpful tools for finding pages that need attention.

Under "Special Pages" in the "Toolbox" menu, you can find many maintenance reports, including a list of the Oldest Pages

Simply work through the list of your choice, fixing as you go :)

Old Design Pages
The wiki is often used for fleshing out the designs of features, which usually start their life as Launchpad Blueprints. These early prototype designs are very useful during implementation, but can become out of date shortly after release when the next development cycle starts. To assist with this, we have two templates to use. Simply include the code at the top of a wiki page to add the banner.

Really Quite Obsolete Pages
In general, if you see an obsolete page, it's best to attempt to improve it. However, there are some pages that for various reasons (eg they are so out of date that they are beyond fixing and their being in search results is causing mass confusion) should be strongly marked as such.

For this, we have the Obsolete namespace.

To move pages to this graveyard, on the top menu click "Actions", "Move", then select the "Obsolete" namespace on the following form.

Note: The "move" command on the wiki is an admin action; please contact a wiki admin to execute the change. It is easier to restore bad moves than page deletes.

Though, just because a page is old, doesn't necessarily mean it should be moved out - sometimes we need to refer to old blueprint plans to see the history, and it's nice to look back at what went on at the Austin summit, so use sparingly.

You can see a list of pages in the Obsolete namespace here

Helping Real Users avoid the CAPTCHA (admin rights needed)
Due to massive spam problems on this wiki, by defauly users must fill out a CAPTCHA to edit a post.

This can be annoying for frequent users, so there is a group called "autopatrol" that avoids this. The "autopatrol" group contains a list of human-verified 'real' users. Aside from avoiding the CAPTCHA, these users' post will automatically be marked as "patrolled", which helps to isolate spam.

Finding users who should have the status

 * 1) Open the list of recent changes, with "patrolled" edits hidden: https://wiki.openstack.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidepatrolled=1&limit=500
 * 2) click "contribs" next to a username, which will take you to a list of contributions from that user
 * 3) Assess the contributions, optionally by clicking to view the "diff" of several of the edits
 * 4) If the user has made many constructive edits, or is otherwise a known member of the OpenStack community, proceed to the "Adding the Status"

Alternately
 * 1) If a known member of the OpenStack community contacts a wiki administrator a link to their wiki user page, proceed to "Adding the Status"

Adding the status

 * 1) From the user's page, click on "user rights management"
 * 2) Tick "verified user"
 * 3) Add a reason eg"verified user (this means your posts are considered "not spam" and you don't have to do the CAPTCHA"
 * 4) Click "save user groups"