About Our Site
From Boots 'n' Buckles Dance Club
The Boots 'n' Buckles website is a wiki, a type of website that allows users to edit and add content. Anyone interested in helping to develop the site is encouraged to email the webmaster to get an account. The type of wiki software used on this site is Wikimedia. The most famous site using Wikimedia software is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that is maintained by thousands of users.
The advantages of using a wiki are that it allows for collaborative development by multiple contributors, and a wiki is relatively fast and easy to update. (The word 'wiki' is Hawaiian for 'quick'.) Contributors can add or edit pages, after logging in to their accounts, while anyone can see the web pages they create, even without an account.
What are those Tabs at the Top of the Page?
These tabs are primarily of interest to contributors, but others may occasionally find them useful. Clicking on the article tab takes you to the page itself. The discussion tab leads to a page where contributors can trade comments about the content and format of the article page. Often this discussion page is blank, if no contributors have entered any comments. The edit tab allows contributors to edit the article page, but they must be logged in to do this. The history tab shows the log of changes made to the page. Even casual users may sometimes be interested in seeing just the latest updates to a page.
How Does the Search Bar Work?
A quick way to navigate to a page, if you happen to remember the title, is to enter the title in the search box and then either press enter or click on 'Go'. Alternatively, you can click on the 'Search' button to search the site for key words you have entered into the search box. Search words are not case-sensitive, meaning that "Class" will return the same results as "class". You can search for two or more words, separating them with a blank space. If you enter more than one key word, the search will yield only pages that contain all the key words you entered. It is not possible to search for a phrase composed of two or more words; so a wiki search for "world war 2" will list out all pages that contain 'world' and 'war' and '2', even if these words are not used together in a phrase.
About the Site Updates Page
Returning visitors to a web site are usually most interested in seeing what has changed since their last visit, but it can be a major effort for the webmaster to maintain a list of site changes. Wikimedia solves this problem by generating a page that shows recent updates to the site. You can view this page by clicking the Site Updates link, the second item in the navigation box on the left of every page. Below is an explanation of the information displayed on this page:
- Select which changes to display. By default, the page shows the last 50 changes in the last 7 days.
- (dif) A page comparing the latest and prior versions of the page.
- (hist) A page showing the entire history of changes to the page in question.
- A link to the page that has been changed.
- The time of the change.
- Who made the change.
- A link to the 'Talk Page' for the user who made the change. Other contributors can add comments to this page to communicate with that user.
- A comment describing the change.