What is Whitehallpedia? It's a wiki! OK, so you're new to the whole concept of a wiki. You don't even know what a wiki is, yet! Not a problem. Fortunately, it's easy to show you what a wiki looks like because you're using one right now. This text, along with every piece of information in the Whitehallpedia, is stored in a very simple computer database called a wiki.
Your next question might be "What a wiki is used for?" Simply put, a wiki is web-based system that allows anyone to easily and quickly create and edit an article about whatever they find interesting. There are lots of wikis on the web. The most successful, by far, is the Wikipedia, with some quarter of a million articles. They've far surpassed the number of articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica in just a short number of years. There are many other wikis out there, as well.

Whitehallpedia is one of these many wiki systems with a more specific focus, in this case on Whitehall, Montana. This kind of wiki is more formally known as a City Wiki. Bloomingpedia isn't the first, nor will it be the last city wiki, but we all hope it will be the best!

Reading Concepts_______________________________________________________________
Maybe you aren't quite ready to start writing for the Whitehallpedia, but you really want to take advantage of it. Great! That's what it's for. Fortunately, just reading the Whitehallpedia is extremely easy.

Links

The primary method of creating a cohesive set of information is creating links from one page to other pages. A good Whitehallpedia article will have blue and red text links that you can click on to take you to another article. Blue links mean there's already an article written for that particular subject. A red link means that there's no article associated with that link, but the person who wrote the article you're reading at the time thought that there should be one. He or she just didn't get around to writing it and is hoping someone else (maybe YOU!) will take that on. Clicking on these red links takes you to an edit/create page for that article. See how easy it is to write new articles? (See the section below for more specifics on editing articles)

Categories

Articles can be placed in one or more arbitrary categories that help organize the BloomingpediaWhitehallpedia article base. There can be categories for anything. Some popular categories include restaurantsbusinesses, history and obituaries

Browsing Whitehallpedia

It's very easy to browse the Whitehallpedia, but each browsing session will be different depending on where you start out. Start out on an obituary and you might just end up reading about a local restaurantsbusiness. That's part of the fun!

Search

But what if you have a specific interest in mind? That's easy, too. On the left hand side of each page there's a search field. Just type what you're looking for and click "Search". The wiki software will search the system for occurences of your search term in the title and the text of an article and streetreturn a list of pages which include your search terms in either addressesor both places. Your searches should be very basic. Examples of good searches include:

• Resturants
Newspapers
• Obituaries

.

Avoid asking full questions or putting any extraneous text in the search. These are examples of bad searches:

• "Where do I find ice cream in Whitehall?" (consider just "ice cream")
• "Where is the museum?" (consider searching for just "Museum")

There's another button below the search bar that says "Go". That simply looks for main articles that have your search term and doesn't search through the body of all Whitehallpedia articles. This is useful if you want to just jump to the main article instead of see every article that references what you're searching for.

Editing Concepts
________________________________________________________________________Very simply put, a wiki is only as good as the people that create and maintain the articles. As the number of contributors increases, the better and more diverse the information becomes. A wiki on the scale of Whitehallpedia cannot survive without a good user base of contributors that pay attention to their surroundings and feel the need to share their understanding and experience with their Whitehall neighbors.

Who can edit?

To be clear, everyone on the Internet has the same level of editing privileges on Whitehallpedia. As long as they create a username and password they can create, edit and delete pages. That sounds dangerous, right? Well, it turns out that it isn't as bad as it sounds. For each change to a webpage, the differences between the versions are kept in the wiki system. When a page is changed, the previous version doesn't go away. The wiki system keeps a log of each page, all the way back to the day the article was created. If someone comes along and vandalizes a page, fixing it is trivial. There are special pages in the Wiki system that let everyone see what changes have occurred since they last looked. So, as long as people are keeping an eye on those pages (and there are), vandalism isn't a problem.

Data Accuracy

OK, so blatantly wrong information can easily be culled out, but what about slightly wrong information? For example, an incorrect phone number, or a wrong historical fact about Whitehall. Who catches those? The answer, again, is you. There will certainly be information that will prove to be wrong at given points in time, but the whole point of a wiki is to grow and evolve. This is the primary reason why a large contributor base is essential to Whitehallpedia's success. The more "experts" Whitehallpedia has on a subject, the more accurate the information. It's always important to keep the following in mind: Whitehallpedia is not a primary reference source. The city is a fluid, changing subject. There will inevitably be inaccuracies and information may become outdated here and there. The beauty of Whitehallpedia's community-based article edit model is that you can fix it. If you notice that a business moves or is closed, fix the article! If some new information about a subject comes up, update the article! Whitehallpedia is all about giving you the power to fix inaccuracies, rather than wait on someone else to do it.