Portal:Social entrepreneurship/Guidelines for Editors

General Editing HowTo

In general, for most users most of the time, just click on an 'edit' link and edit the text.

If you intend to become a major contributor to the Social Entrepreneurship portal, then it will help if all the editors have a common vision for the portal and how it will grow to accommodate new learning resources contributed by many diverse educators and learners.

First see How to get involved and Courses etc. - on using MediaWiki-based learning environments such as WikiEducator and WikiVersity.

The main Student Social Entrepreneurship (SSE) pages have been structured to enable editing of boxes on the pages and each box has links to "more". You are most likely to be editing "more" pages, or the "Resources" and "Activities" pages. The guide below will help.

When editing a page, look out for any "Help" links or other helpful information around the edit box. See also: Editing Help.

Adding to the Front/Main Page

• First log in.
• Follow the example of the current content of the box you wish to edit:
  • keep the size of images and the amount of text about the same,
  • use the same convention for naming and hierarchy, and
  • ensure links that should not change are retained (e.g. "more"/ "previous", links to categories, etc.).
• Check that the full article you are about to replace is listed (and linked to) in the "more" page which keeps track of previous entries - e.g. more (profiles), or more (case studies), or more (previous news items), or more more (related portals), etc.
  • If not, add a link to the full article in the appropriate "Previously featured" or "more" page.
• If you need to upload a new image:
  • first scale and crop the image to an appropriate size using your own graphics program,
  • save it as PNG or JPEG,
  • upload the image (click on the "upload file" link on the left), and
  • link to the image as described here.
• Click on the "Edit" link of the relevant box.
  • Insert your new text (typically a catchy title and short 1- or 2- sentence introduction. Keep the "more" link pointing to a list of previous entries in the box.
    • Link the catchy title text you just added to your full article. Name it according to the pattern of the previous one that you are replacing (i.e. keep the same hierarchical relationship if there is one)
      • For example, to add a case study called "Soweto Primary Health Care" (catchy title), create a link to it as follows: [[Portal:Social_entrepreneurship/Case_Studies/Soweto Primary Health Care|Soweto Primary Health Care]].
• Assign one or more categories to your article.
  • For example, if it is a News Item add the following to the end of your article: [[Category:News (Social Entrepreneurship)]]
  • if it concerns health issues, add [[Category:Health (Social Entrepreneurship)]]
  • etc. - in this way, the article you created will show up when users browse Categories etc.
    • Here is a list of categories
• Save the page.
• Add a link to this page in the "more" page - click on "more" and edit the page to include a link to the new page you have created.
  • For the example above, you would add the following to the beginning of the list of previously featured case studies:

    * [[Portal:Social_entrepreneurship/Case_Studies/Soweto Primary Health Care|Soweto Primary Health Care]]

• The "Topics" block should not require editing. To make your page findable under "Topics", assign it a category. There is more on Categories in this Editor's Guide (below).

Adding Learning Resources

Learning resources need not be "under" the portal - no hierarchy required - though it can be useful if navigation up a hierarchy is useful. See notes on hierarchies below.

In general, you can just edit existing pages or create new ones in the usual ways taught in the various courses (above). If you want to create a whole new module for the SSE curriculum, try using the Template:Module Intro Page (<--- click and scroll down to "Usage" on that page).

Level at which to pitch learning resources

• The learners will most likely be students at universities intending to do social entrepreneurial work with developing communities.
• Most of the learning resources are aimed at providing pragmatic insights for best practices while doing social entrepreneurial work.

Structuring Learning Resources

Navigation Template

• An idea from Leigh Blackall has been extended and implemented on many of the social entrepreneurship curriculum pages as a "navigation template".
  • An example is shown on the page: Discuss SSE Navigation Template
  • See "To use the SSE Navigation Template" for instructions.

Modules

You can also create full pages for a learning resource. For example, to create a full introductory page for a course or module with sub-pages for Activities, Resources, Community and Links, see Template:Module Intro Page. Scroll down to the Usage section.

Learning Activities

The approach for the learning Activity pages is to add the following to the beginning of your Activities page:

{{Add activity}}

save the page and click on the resulting "Add Activity" link to add activity summaries (e.g. sample activity page).

These in turn link to "Activity Details" which use this template: {{Activity Detail}} (scroll down to "Usage" on that template's page for details if you are interested).

Categories and Status

• For each learning resource, add a category according to the curriculum, and/or a new category.
  • Category Tree
  • Browse existing Categories.
  • List of Categories
• For each learning resource include a template indicating its status. We still need to create templates such as:

 e.g.  ... {{l10n needed}} ... {{ready for use}}

• Alternatively, use project boxes.

Build Hierarchies

But not usually more than 3 levels deep: top level (almost like a table of contents, an index or category), main content (overview and possibly some detail), in depth topics, etc. To get a hierarchy, use this notation: [[/Name of New Page/]] - the new page becomes a sub-page of the current page and its URL will include the name of the current page.

N.B. In general, avoid putting learning resources in the "Portal:Social entrepreneurship" hierarchy. This hierarchy is for structuring the portal. The learning resources should be in the main namespace.

See WikiEducator tutorial on sub-pages.

Themes

New and average users should not be concerned with themes and focus on using and generating learning resources (adding/editing text, links and possibly images and media files).

Themes are applied to boxes and sections on pages, or even whole pages. The SSE project has a few predefined themes. Using them is an advanced topic not covered in depth here.

A page created with Template:Module_Intro_Page may have associated with it a named "theme combo" (e.g. "sse" or "mix" etc.) which specifies a theme (e.g. SSE Themes) for each box on the page.

Each box may also have an image (icon) depending on its theme combo for the page.

If you are technically inclined, see the following (which are not all well documented yet):

Template:Module Intro Page generates a page for a module with links to sub-pages for Activities, Resources, Community and Links. When generating such a page, you can specify a theme combo by name (e.g. "sse" or "mix" - see Template:Box themes combo) which specifies a set of themes - one for each type of box on the page. The relevant attributes of a theme for a box are referenced via Template:Box Theme Attribute.

In addition to a theme (colours for box title text, title background, text, background and borders), each box may also have an image (actually an icon) which may be referenced via Template:Theme box image - returns the image for a specified kind of box (e.g. intro box, preparation box, tips box, etc.).

Template:Module Page Image contains a collection of common images for a page. Changing this template changes the box images on all the pages which use the relevant templates.

The default theme is currently "grey day" and the default image is currently a blue question mark (9 January 2009).

Tools etc. for developing learning resources

• When editing a page, use the help links below the editing area.

• html2wiki - Convert HTML text to wiki markup

• WikiEducator Tutorials
  • Open Educational Content
  • Wikieducator Tutorials
  • Help Tutorials for creating OERs on WikiEducator

• eXe

See Also

• To Do
• Resources for Social Entrepreneurship Educators
• OER Mini-handbook for Educators
• Help Contents