Fortran Wiki
Fortran Wiki discussion

This page is for discussing the Fortran Wiki.

Fortran Wiki Basics

Below are some basic questions about using the wiki. Also see the HowTo for more details.

Choosing a Username

When you edit a page, you will be asked to give your name. What you choose isn’t important per se, but you should choose something that you want to continue using since that name will be associated with a wiki page that will serve as your user page. A link to your user page will appear at the bottom of each page you edit.

You may choose, for example, to use your full name with standard spacing and spelling. The wiki is UTF-8 compatible so if the characters of your name aren’t in ISO 8859-1, you should still feel free to use your real name.

At first, it will have a question mark since there is no page with your name yet. You are encouraged to create a user page to tell us about yourself, but if you don’t want to or don’t have the time right now, you can simply ignore this. If you just want to show up on category: people and the Users page, then you make a page containing only category: people and place a link on Users (someone else may even do this for you).

Can I switch usernames?

Sure. You probably want to move the information from your old user page to the new one and place a link on the old page:

Moved to [[New Name]].

category: redirect

You could also contact me and I can edit the database directly with the appropriate SQL UPDATE statement to attribute all of your previous edits to your new user name.

Should I leave comments in the text itself or on a separate discussion page?

I don’t want to make strict rules about discussion. I think it should evolve on a case-by-case basis. For pages with lots of content already, like Object-oriented programming, maybe a dedicated OOP discussion page would be best. Other pages might work better with a section at the bottom for discussion, and others could be mixed and we could gradually clean up the discussion as we hash things out. We can always reorganize things as needed.

My preference is to have a wiki that is less strict than Wikipedia, but without as much free-form discussion as, say, Ward’s wiki. I think the EmacsWiki is a good model.

What’s the best way to get rid of link spam?

The wiki engine, Instiki, has some built in spam protection which prevents most automated spam, but is not effective against human spammers. The latter seems to be the source of the link spam we receive here.

If you see spam on a page, please click the “Back in Time” link at the bottom of the page and then, assuming the previous revision is the last good one, click the “Rollback” link at the bottom of the page. This will remove the spam until the site administrator can remove the spam edits from the database (and thus, from the page history).

There is some discussion of general spam strategies here. The best way to prevent human spam seems to be to remove the incentive, which is that the links get indexed by search engines and provide page rank to the sites funding the spammers. In particular, Delayed Indexing is a strategy where pages that have been recently edited get a special header which tells search engines not to index the page for a certain amount of time. The idea is that this interval should be long enough to give users time to see and remove the spam first. Instiki does not presently have this feature, but could be added by someone knowledge of Ruby on Rails. —Jason Blevins, 26 April 2012