If you'd like to learn more about working with the nuts and bolts of Memory Alpha, I have a few links that you might want to check out:

• Our policies and guidelines provides links to inform you on what is appropriate for Memory Alpha and what is not. Particular items of note are the content and resource policies, the editing guidelines, our point of view, copyrights, and guidelines for proper etiquette.
• How to edit a page includes a basic tutorial about how to use our special wikitext code here on Memory Alpha.
• Naming conventions provides guidelines on how to name a new page that you may want to create.
• The Manual of Style is an overview of the basic guidelines for how to format and style your articles.
• How to write a great article is a list of suggestions that can help you put together an article that might end up on our Featured Articles list someday.
• See the user projects page for current projects of our archivists, or help us to reduce the number of stubs.
• Look up past changes you have made in your contributions log.
• Keep track of your favorite Memory Alpha articles through your very own watchlist.
• Create your own user page and be contacted on this page, your talk page.

One other suggestion: if you're going to make comments on talk pages or make other sorts of comments, please be sure to sign them with four tildes (~~~~) to paste in your user name and the date/time of the comment.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in our Ten Forward community page. Thanks, and once again, welcome to Memory Alpha! -Platypus Man | Talk 19:28, 7 Oct 2005 (UTC)

"The Search, Part II" Edit

Hello and welcome to Memory Alpha! I have a couple of suggestions that might help you with your work on "The Search, Part II" and other episode pages.

I like that you have divided the page into sections, which is easier on the eyes. However, you might make it slightly less fragmented, because as it currently stands the Table of Contents is quite long. In many article, such as season two finale "The Jem'Hadar", it is divded into "acts" based on commercial breaks. If you find that too bland, perhaps something along the lines of "A Fistful of Datas" would be to your liking.

Also, Wikifying is good, but it's not always necessary after the first occurrance. An example would be the links to Founders' homeworld and Founder - two links might be good if they are far apart, but it has a few too many right now. Some links also lead to Founders rather than Founder (which makes it a link to a list of Founders). If this wasn't your intention, [[Founder]]s will still produce Founders. One more thing: If you are currently or will be working on the episode in the near future, you can add {{inuse}} to the top of the article. That will produce this:

Hopefully you will find my suggestions helpful, and welcome again. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions. Makon 22:23, 9 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

1. I basically followed the scene changes. There were a LOT of scene changes in this episode.
2. I'm still getting used to the wiki markup language. In some ways, it sort of sucks but I'm getting there ;)
3. You did a very good job in cleaning up "Salient Points" thanks. I was starting to burn out on that episode.
4. I was wondering about the tagging. I now know 'inuse' and 'pna' ;) Are there any other meta tags and if so, where do I find out about them?

Slamlander 14:42, 10 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Templates are at Memory Alpha:Template. I hope you don't take offense to my removal of some background information, but things like the source used and the synopsizing shouldn't go in the article. You can still view the old version in the page history if you want to put the information on your user page or subpages. I'm a minimalist about my user page, but some people (Shran's a good example) go into a lot of detail about what they've done. --Schrei 09:50, 10 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the template info. ... synopsizing??? What's that? Slamlander 10:40, 10 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Synopsize (or synopsise) is a transitive verb that means "to form a new word out of an existing word (ie synopsis) when one is tired." :P --Schrei 11:26, 10 Oct 2005 (UTC)

• A great amount of information on using M/A and answers to many of your questions can be found in the links mentioned in the initial welcome message left to you by Platypus Man. It is always highly recommended that utilize those helpful links, hence why they were given to you in the first place. ;) Additionally, in better understanding the concept of canon, it also recommended that you visit, Memory Alpha:Content policy or Memory Alpha:Content policy FAQ. Thanks. --Alan del Beccio 14:44, 10 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Show previewEdit

Just letting you know about one of Memory Alpha's features, the "show preview" button is located next to the "save page" button. It allows you to see how the changes you made will look before you go ahead and write an article to the database.

I noticed that you have edited several articles and talk pages almost a dozen times each to add only a few changes -- please try to avoid this -- if you save an article 10 times, then each image is saved, taking up ten times as much filespace as if you had only saved each article once or twice.

By using the "show preview" feature, you could check to see if your signature is right, or if all the links work properly, without having to use more than one edit to make only one or two lines of changes. Thanks! -- Captain Mike K. Bartel^talk 06:52, 12 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I just discovered it yesterday. However, there are a few problems. I lost a bunch of changes the other day because of performance problems. My usual response to this is to increase the frequency of intermediate changes. I was not aware that the Wiki S/W was saving complete images. I will try to find another way to not lose work. Cannons go "BOOM"! 06:58, 12 Oct 2005 (UTC)

• Is there a GUI client editor that will let me create Wiki files off-line? Cannons go "BOOM"! 07:01, 12 Oct 2005 (UTC)
  • Notepad, Wordpad or another simple text editor will let you write text to paste into a wiki edit. -- Captain Mike K. Bartel^talk 14:50, 12 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Episode pages Edit

Hey, I remembered seeing you doing the summary for "The Search, Part II", so I thought you might be interested in this. Vedek Dukat has started a page where he lists episodes without summaries, so if you can't decide what to watch or want to work on something, check out User:Vedek Dukat/Episodes. :-) Weyoun 18:56, 13 Nov 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks for the notification. I probably won't be able to do much on anything until after my book release though :( --Major Pita 19:40, 14 Nov 2005 (UTC)

• Sorry to hear about the deadline (of course I have no idea what I'm sorry about, but I know it's bad :-P). Hope everything turns out okay. Weyoun 20:14, 14 Nov 2005 (UTC)