Groupprops:Customize your experience

Okay, so you have created your own user account and login at Groupprops. What next?

If you have further questions after reading this, refer the FAQ or contact the helpdesk.

Create a user page
The first thing you should do is let others know who you are and what you seek to get out of Groupprops. For this, you can start editing your user page.

Once logged in, you will see a collection of links on the top right side of the page. The left-most of these links will be named with your username. Clicking in this link takes you to your user page.

Identify your user type
There are several user types as of now: beginner, semi-beginner, expert, as well as theme-related user types (which have not been formalized yet). You can identify your user type on your page by using the mytype template. For instance, if you classify yourself as a beginner, you could simply type:

Tell us about yourself
Your user page on Groupprops is definitely not a personal web hosting service, so keep it brief and simple -- tell us where/what you study, why you are interested in this wiki, and how you are contributing to it. You can also give links to other related work you are doing and to your personal homepage.

Please do not edit any other person's user page.

For a sample (though not a very good one!) user page check out Vipul's home page.

Your watchlist
A good way of keeping track of developments on a wiki is a personal watchlist. Go to Special:Watchlist or click on the My Watchlist link in the top right hand. This takes you to the list of recent changes in the pages that you have marked for watching.

Some tips on maintaining a watchlist:


 * If you read an article and would like to watch it, click on the watch link among the blue links on top of the article page (the watch link is rightmost). The link is not visible unless you are logged in.
 * After you edit an article (if you are logged in), you can check the button Watch this page just below the text box for editing. This will add the page to your watchlist
 * You can display and edit your complete watchlist (you are given this option after you go to your watchlist).

A watchlist is among the simplest ways of coping with the huge mass of material, much of which may not be relevant to you.

Tracking pages through RSS/Atom
You can now keep track of Groupprops pages using RSS/Atom feeds. For this, go to the page you want to keep track of, and click the history' blue button on top of the page. Now, in the toolbox on the lower left margin, there are links titled RSS and Atom.

Preferences
Depending on how keen you are to stay abreast of changes to the wiki, you can have settings that send you email when changes are made. You can also change a whole lot of other display settings. In particular, you can change settings on how you want Math to be rendered when you view pages. Note that these settings only affect your own view of the page and not the content of the page, and moreover, the settings will hold only when you are logged in.

Editing
Once you have registered on Groupprops, you can edit any page (except a few select pages, which have been locked to prevent abuse) while logged in. To edit a page, click the "edit" blue button at the top of the page.

If you want to edit a particular section or subsection of a page, click the edit button adjacent to that section. There are certain subsections whose headers are template-generated; when you click "edit" on these, you go instead to the generating template. If you want to edit such subsections, you need to click the "edit" button on the whole page, or on a higher-level section containing it.

By default, a rich text editor is opened for you, which renders the text as Wikitext. If you do not want Wikitext rendered every time you edit a page, go to "My preferences" and under Editing, check Disable rich editor. Don't forget to save your preferences.

Becoming familiar with conventions
By conventions I mean mathematical conventions used in this wiki, which are points of contention/ambiguity in the mathematical community. For this, refer to Category:Groupprops conventions.

Putting comments
When putting comments, make sure that:


 * You put your comments in the right section
 * You do not remove any other person's comments or restructure past comments (unless you have some administrative responsibility)
 * You sign your comments by putting four tildes at the end. This will atuomatically put your username and the timestamp (you can change timestamp settings in your Preferences)

Your own talk page
Your own talk page, which you can go to by clicking the my talk link at the top right of the page. People can post comments for you on this page.

You can also post comments on your own talk page -- this is the typical way to reply to other people's comments on your talk page.

Other people's talk pages
You can post comments on other people's talk pages as well.

Discussion pages of articles and other stuff
For every article, you will find a corresponding discussion page. On the top of the article, there will be a link saying discussion (second from the left). For some articles, a discussion page has already been created, so you can insert your own comments at the appropriate place. For others, you can start off the discussion yourself!

Article requests, helpdesk, and feedback
You can request an article, contact the helpdesk or provide feedback.

Exporting and downloading pages
You are welcome to save individual pages as complete, rendered pages. However, if you would like to download a large number of pages, please use the MediaWiki export feature. Go to Special:Export, and in the text area, fill in the names of the pages you want to download. Each pagename must occupy one line. The page name is simply the name of the page e.g. "Abelian group" or "Solvable group" and is not the full page URL.

You can also export, wholesale, all pages in a particular category, through options available on the export page.

To get a list of all pages on the wiki, go to Special:Allpages.

The export feature returns a XML file, that can be imported into any other wiki which runs MediaWiki, using that wiki's Special:Import page.

Being aware of dangers
Please read Groupprops:Hazards to learn more about the hazards of using this wiki.

More wikis
Groupprops is hopefully only the first among many mathematical wikis. You are encouraged to join up on the other wikis, most of which are currently not as far developed as Groupprops. Here is a list of the other wikis: