RP:Basic navigation

Finding articles and site functions Basic navigation in ResearchPipeline's wiki How to navigate the wiki Research Pipeline's wiki articles are all linked, or cross-referenced. Where you see text it means there is a link to some relevant article or wiki page with further information elsewhere if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will often show you where a link will take you. These links mean that articles do not need to cover common ground in depth; instead, you are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached. There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external web sites and pages, and reference material. At the end of the article are relevant categories which you can search and traverse in an interconnected hierarchy for further related information in a field. You can add further links if a relevant link is missing; this is one way to contribute. Main Page There's a browsing bar at the top of the Main Page with links to Categories, Portals, Featured content and the A-Z index. Each category is a list of sub-categories or articles. Portals bring you to sub-portals and portals, which are illustrated article summaries like on the Main Page. Featured content is the way to the best articles, pictures, lists and portals in the encyclopedia. A-Z index finds a page from the first two or three letters of its title. Contents and index browsing To help you find your way around our world of datasets, Research Pipeline has many pages that organize its contents. These lists and indices use links to the articles that are organized by subject or alphabetically. Category browsing Every article has a list at the bottom of all the major categories it belongs to. For example Hubble Space Telescope Science Data Archive is listed under: Category:Datasets, Category:Hubble Space Telescope Each of these categories can be browsed and is linked to related categories in an interconnected hierarchy or web. Try browsing the various categories below right now: Datasets | Software | Journal | Other Resources Top tabs (above the article) Each page in Research Pipeline's wiki contains an article, and a discussion page (usually called "Talk...") You can see these above: the article is labelled "project page", the discussion page is the tab to the right of it. These are treated as two separate pages in the wiki, but are shown side by side on the tab bar, for ease of use. Whether you are looking at the article or project page, or the discussion page, you will see there is a button marked "edit this page", possibly a "new section" button, and a button labelled "watch" or "unwatch". edit this page - this is the key to contributing to the wiki. When you click this button, you change from viewing an article or discussion about an article, to being able to edit the article, or add comments to the discussion that is going on. Occasionally, pages that are important or may be vandalized are locked, in which case the "edit" will show "view source", and you will not be able to edit the article at that time. Page editing is simple with the wiki, and you cannot harm a page if you make a mistake, since all changes can be undone. This is part of the wiki's vandal protection. "new section" - adds a new section to a discussion page, without changing what is already there. history - All editable pages on the wiki have an associated page history, which consists of the old versions of the wikitext, as well as a record of the date and time (in UTC) of every edit, the username or IP address of the user who wrote it, and their edit summary. watch/unwatch - adds or removes a page from your watchlist, the list of pages you are tracking. You can view your watchlist with the user option button "my watchlist" at the top right of the screen. User options (top right) These control your user account. To create a user account you only need to choose a name and a password. An email address is optional and only used for password reminders. Unless you create an account you will not be able to customize Wikipedia preferences for yourself. Almost all experienced editors use an account in order to ensure accountability. The user options also include links to view your watchlist (articles you are tracking), and contributions you have made.