Sustainable Trails Toolbox Users' Guide

General Structure

Each resource (publication - paper, book, manual or other material included in the toolbox) gets a page with a structured description. The description is written in a wiki-style markup language, where different parts of the text can be marked as (sub)titles, emphasized with bold or italics, be organized into numbered or bulleted lists, and contain internal or external references (links).

According to our current convention, the title of each page should start with the title of the publication it is referring to, followed by the name of the author and its year of publication in brackets. If the original title is not in English, an English translation of the title should be separately added in brackets between the original title and the author-year pair.

We usually provide a link to the referenced resource only, but it is technically possible to upload a file and link it to the page internally.

Each page can be assigned to one or more categories, based on its topic(s). See more on categories below.

A category itself is also a page and may have a description. A category page is prefixed with Category: in its title. This prefix can be used for searching categories and creating new categories as well. For example, to search for or refer to the category "Bridges", you may enter "Category:Bridges".

Every in text link which appears in red references a page that does not currently exist. Clicking on a red link opens a form for contributors to create the missing page (including categories).

Category Tree

Categories are organized into a tree-like structure, with parent-child (category-subcategory) relationships. Each category is linked to its parent category. For example, the child "Category:Blazing" has "Category:Trail Marking" as its parent, and this relationship must have been defined in the subcategory "Category:Blazing".

Some categories may have multiple parents, therefore, categories form a directed acyclic graph, not a classical tree.

Furthermore, categories may be linked to others if they are found to be related by contributors, to help visitors browse among related content. This linking is different than assigning a parent category.

The general root category is "Category:All", which has the main general dimensions of our categorization as direct children, such as scale, environment character, sustainability pillar. Categories can be nested in an arbitrary level.

It is advised to assign the most specific category or categories to each page, related to its content.

Searching for Content

One or more words can be entered into the search box and hitting enter will list the pages in which the those words can be found. The search looks in page titles primarily, and in the full text of page contents secondarily. By default, only the pages corresponding to publications (not category pages) are searched for their content.

To include categories in a search, click on Everything in the search page. This will include all content, including the categories.

To search for specific categories, or pages belonging to a category, you add "Category:" as a prefix to the category name. It will retrieve the category page, if it exists, as well as the pages and direct subcategories belonging to that category. To view the list of pages and categories associated with each subcategory separately, simply open the corresponding subcategory page in the results.

Browsing and Listing Content

There are different ways to navigate through the wiki. One option is to search. Another is to browse the listing of all pages or categories, or the listing of recent changes and additions. The category tree can also be retrieved and the subcategories for each branch can be opened and closed one-by-one, by clicking on the small arrow ( ) in front of them.

For each page, the category(/ies) it belongs to are listed in a side panel on the right side of the page. The categories are clickable.

Clicking on a category will open its page, with the category description (if any), and the pages and subcategories in alphabetical order belonging to that category.

Links are highlighted in blue, they can be used to navigate between related content. Red links refer to missing pages. Such a page can be created or the link can be corrected to point to an existing page (for instance, if a page title has been renamed without replacing all references to it, older references may still point to the former page).

There are specific navigation pages providing various approaches to reach relevant content based on trail dimensions, sustainability pillars, specific questions or issues. These can be found in the Toolbox Navigation category.

Creating a New Page

The easiest way to create a new page is to enter its title to the search box. If no page is found with that title, the system will offer the option for contributors to create it via a red link.

Enter the contents in the big text box. Use an existing page of a similar content as a template (until official, approved templates are ready to use) in the following way: Open another browser tab or window, go to an existing toolbox wiki content page, click 'edit source' and copy the contents of that page to the clipboard (Ctrl+C). Go back to the new page and paste the contents (Ctrl+V). You may delete any specific content elements and retain the structure of the whole page as a reference. You can learn practices of using the wiki markup from it, too (such as linking, category reference, sections or lists etc). If you need to add extra data fields or content, feel free to make suitable adaptations of the template.

Do not forget to assign one or more suitable categories to the page (see below).

See more details on editing below, in section Editing Content.

After entering the contents, the page can be saved. A description field is offered to enter the summary of the edits, but it can be left blank.

Use the checkbox 'Watch this page' if you want to get notifications of any edits being made by other contributors in the future.

Be cautious when creating new pages so no wrong title will be saved initially (renaming will keep the old title as well with a redirection).

Referencing a Category

To add (assign) a page to a category, just put the category reference at the end of the page, in the form of double square brackets, like this:"[[Category:Blazing]]". This will not appear in the text, but in the side panel on the right of the page. You may assign one or more categories, one after another (each in a new line, as recommended).

If you want additional references to that (or other) categories, which should appear explicitly in the content text, use a colon preceding the category, like this: "[[:Category:Blazing]]". Using this format will not add the page under the Blazing category, but will put a link to Blazing as a related category.

This way, the page will appear in the listing of the assigned category(/ies). Note that each page is listed only in the explicitly referenced categories, and a page assigned to a subcategory will not appear in the listing of its parent category. However, in the future, it may be considered to design & implement special inclusive listings to utilize the category tree more effectively.

Creating a Category

Creating a category is similar to creating a content page. Just write "Category:" as the prefix and write the desired category name. Do not add a space behind the colon. However, you may have spaces inside the category name.

Turning a category into a subcategory of another (parent) category, is done exactly the same way as adding (assigning) a page to a category. This will build up the category tree. The parent category does not have to reference its child categories.

If you want to refer to another, related category, in a way which does not create a parent-child relationship, use the colon as the starting character in the double square brackets, such as [[:Category:Blazing]]. This will be an explicit link to the referenced category page in the content text, instead of assigning the page itself to the referenced category.

Be cautious when creating new pages so no wrong title will be saved initially (renaming will keep the old title as well with a redirection).

Editing Content

Any authorized contributor can edit any content, and the editing history is logged for future reference and transparency. Based on that, it is also possible to revert to a previous edition of a page.

To edit any page (including a category page) click on the Edit source link. This will open a window where you can use the wiki markup syntax to enter content. Plain text is treated as usual, but special characters or arrangements have special meanings. This way you can add section headers, internal or external links, lists, other elements or formatting.

The most important elements are the following:

• Entering a newline will not break the text. If you want multiple paragraphs, add at least one empty line between them.
• A line starting with an equal sign followed by a space, and ending with a space and an equal sign will be treated as a primary section header.
• You can use multiple equal signs next to each other to create subsection headers in different levels.
• A line starting with an asterisk and a space creates a bullet list element.
• Double square brackets create internal links in the text. Just type the exact page title in these brackets to make a clickable reference to a specific page.
• If a linked page does not exist, the link will be displayed in red. Most of the time, it indicates a spelling error. Links to existing pages are colored blue by default. However, you may intentionally link to a nonexistent page in advance and create it by clicking on the red link.
• If a category is linked (using the prefix Category:), it is not shown in the main text, but will be interpreted as an assignment of the page to the category named. If you want to explicitly link to a category, use the colon as a prefix (such as :Category:).
• Uploaded files can be linked just as any other page. Use the File: prefix for them in double square brackets.
• You can use four tildes next to each other to add your username and the date-time of your current edit. This is useful when you make personal comments, reviews, or in a page discussion (see below).

There are many other wiki markup options you may use for formatting and adding special elements. Check the general explanation here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting .

Note that there is an Edit option as well, which opens a graphical editor, where you can use a toolbar for adding special elements or formatting. Beware that not every element will be visible, and you may have issues applying some of the special markups. You can always switch back to source editing mode by clicking on the pen icon in the upper right.

After you have finished editing, you should save the page. Note that if your connection is unstable, and you are making a major edit, you might loose your work if saving of the page is not successful. Therefore, it is always recommended to copy the whole contents to the clipboard before saving, or to make only minor edits in a row.

When saving, you can give a brief comment as a description, mainly for fellow contributors, highlighting the essence and/or reason of your edit. This can be left blank if it is straightforward. You can also subscribe for future page edits, by adding the page to your watchlist (requires a registration of an e-mail address in your user profile).

Adding content to Categories

If you want to add (assign) a page to a category, or a make a category become a subcategory of another, use the internal linkage to the category. Wherever you place it, will not be displayed as a link inside the text, but in the categories box on the right of the main panel.

A convention is to use these type of links only at the end of the main content, which makes the category assignments better manageable.

Content Guidelines

(Note that these guidelines are under discussion and should be consolidated. Look at the existing uploaded pages for examples. In the future, page templates will be added to the system, which will eventually help contributors entering content.)

Page titles and category names should start with uppercase letters.

If a category name has multiple words, each of them should be uppercased, except the short grammatical elements (prefixes and alike), as it would look in a title of a publication. The character & is used in the category names if the word and is needed.

A category page (starting with Category:) may have a short description or clarification as needed. Some related categories may follow by explicit linkage, as a bulleted list (these are not the parent categories, they do not form the category hierarchy).

A page title should have the original title of the referenced resource/publication first. If the language is not English, a translation should follow in brackets. After the title, a pair in brackets should follow with the author and year of publication, separated by a comma.

Each page corresponding to a resource/publication should have a similar content structure, reflecting the type of the publication, a link or guidance on where/how to find it, a summary (abstract - for scientific papers, it should be the original abstract/summary if it is available), table of contents (optional), and its official bibliographical data (as a bulleted list).

Furthermore, it should contain remarks about its relevance to the Sustainable Trails Toolbox, in the form of a bulleted list (so a user of the toolbox can assess whether this resource/publication is worth reading or looking at). This is part of the literature review being done by the professional contributors of the toolbox. There should be a toolbox review section as well, where one or more brief review can be given by one or more toolbox contributors. Highlighted content can be included in the form of Citations as well.

If the language is not English, the source language has to be indicated, and at least a brief summary/abstract given in English. Translation of the table of contents and/or an excerpt/transcript of key points can help the readers to get a sense of what the document is about, so they can make translations for themselves as needed.

Category assignments should appear at the very bottom, one category by line.

Discussion (Talk Page)

Contributors of this toolbox wiki strive for consensus. However, a disagreement or critique is possible, and reaching a consensus may take a longer process. Each page, including the categories, provides a link to a talk/discussion, which is a parallel content page to the main one. Here, any discussion can take place.

Please use a section header each time you start a new discussion (see above at the cotent editing), and identify yourself when making a point in the discussion, by using the four tildes (see content editing above, too).

Although page history is always available, and minor edits or adding new content makes no harm to anyone, if you think you have found a major mistake, questionable or inappropriate content, the discussion page can be a platform to resolve it. You may add a note in the main content at the criticized part about your

The talk page is always related to a specific content or category page, and is for discussion among contributors about the content of the page. Individual reviews of papers can be added to the main content under the toolbox reviews, by identifying the reviewer. Comments or suggestions for the whole wiki system or a larger scope can be added to the ideas & suggestions page, see below.

Renaming a Title (Page or Category)

If you want to rename a page (or a category), use the Move function in the Page tools panel (it appears usually in the upper right corner when editing). You may give a new title to the page / name to a category. Note that this would break all links pointing to the renamed page, but a redirect page (see below) will automatically added with the original title, pointing to the new page.

Do not over-use the renaming function as it creates redirects by default, and the existing references from other pages will still point to the original title. Be cautious when creating new pages so no wrong title will be saved initially.

Note: The Move function cannot be used for moving a category in the category tree. Use the category assignment references for that purpose (see above).

For wiki site administrators (admin users): When renaming a page, the option for creating a redirect can be switched off and the system offers the replace text function to change all references. This is highly advised if a page was created with a wrong title, or a decision is taken in favour of a new title or category name, without the need to keep the original title. These features are only authorized for admin users. An admin task is to look through the wiki contents for unnecessary redirects and clean them up regularly using this method.

Synonyms and Redirects

A nice and useful feature of MediaWiki is redirecting. This way, a page or category can be referenced by multiple titles.

It is used as an automatic mechanism for renamed pages, not to break existing references (see above).

This feature can also be used intentionally by wiki contributors to create multiple names (titles) for the same content. Its main use in our trails wiki is the category synonyms, that is, if two or more different terms may be used to identify the same category: one of them will be chosen as the main category name, and the category page will be created using it as a title. Its synonyms can be created as separate category pages, each with a redirect content to the primary category page.

A page redirect does not have to mean the same as the one it redirects to. It can also be used intentionally as a see-another-page reference. For example, if there is a category which refers to a concept with a broader spectrum than another, likely used term, but there is no need to create a separate category for that second term, it can be used as a redirect to the first one. For example, if the term Stream is likely to be searched as a category, but there is no need to create that as a separate category, using Watershed as the main category page may be more convenient and a Stream category page can be created with a simple redirect to the Watershed category. This mechanism can be used for terms for which it is unknown yet if they should become a separate category in the future, as well.

Note that a redirect page may be edited at any time, and may become a separate page with its own contents. A redirect page is just like any other page, but its first content line has an initial hashmark, directly followed by the text REDIRECT and the target page title in double square brackets.

Redirect pages (including categories) appear in italics in listings.

Uploading a File

Normally it is enough to provide an external link to the resource/publication. It is, however, possible to upload a file and link it to its toolbox page, by using the internal link format (double square brackets), and the File: prefix. You will find the file upload link on the Main page. Legal issues must be clarified in general.

Issues, Ideas & Suggestions

If, as a contributor, you find any mistake in the content, feel free to edit it. Our goal is to bring in our best as a collective, and build consensus. If there is no agreement on the content, the discussion/talk page is available to exchange opinions for any content page or category.

If you happen to have any suggestions for future improvement beyond the above, or you notice any errors in the system, please add it to this page: Toolbox Ideas & Todos.

Admin Contact

This Wiki is created and maintained by the WTN Trails and Sustainability Task Team, Nat Scrimshaw & András J. Molnár. Contributors welcome.

Contact: nat@mountainsteward.net