User talk:Alanjones10

From Biographical Wiki

Alan!

Welcome to the Biographical Wiki!

Thanks for the note about the duplicate page. It is my job to delete duplicates and your timely notification was helpful.

The other thing you can do when a page is created (with a name that needs to be changed) is to "move" that page. "Moving a page" is Wiki-talk for "re-naming a page".

Say for instance, you find Simeon Bale's death date. You want to change the name of the page to "Simeon Bale (1830-1812)". When you are logged in to the Wiki, click on the "Move" tab at the top of the screen. You will be asked for the new page name and a reason for the name change. Fill in that information and click on "Move page".

When a page is moved, the wiki creates the new page, moving the entire contents from the old page. The old, empty page is then used as a "re-direct" that points to the page with the new page name. That means that any time someone tries to go to the page named "Simeon Bale (1830-)", they will automatically end up at the page named "Simeon Bale (1830-1912)".

If you go to the Special Pages link (on the left in the toolbox), you can find a link to a page called "List redirects". If you click on that link, you will see any existing redirects that the Biographical Wiki currently has. As an Administrator, I go through the redirects periodically and delete the unnecessary pages (after first verifying that no other pages link to them), cleaning up the results of biography building.

The whole point of this wiki is to create useful, detailed biographies. That is a process of research and discovery. It is expected that users will create pages and then rename them as new information is discovered.

I apologize for my long-winded discussion about re-naming pages. I am an enthusiastic wikiist. Steve (talk·edits) 00:00, 8 March 2009 (MST)