Re: [Fhsst-bio] Strategy for Biology

[Mark Horner]

Hi Nicole and team

(sorry this is a longish email)

I have got things started on WikiBooks. If you go to

http://www.wikibooks.com

you will see a list of new WikiBooks - the newest one should be
FHSST Biology. Just click on it to go to the main Biology page. The
picture that is missing will be the cover of the book but we don't have one
yet.


I made 3 pages to start off with
- Index
- Contributors
- Guidelines

The Index only has the first Physics chapter in it because I needed a 
quick layout solution and I have no
idea what Biology chapter should come first. I put my name on the 
Contributors list to start the page and
I wrote some trivial guidelines.

***  Could everone please add themselves to the Contributors page by 
editing it. Its very simple and there is extensive help on the site - 
but I'll mention some things below as well.

Please don't be intimidated by the Wiki. There is a tiny learning curve 
but wikis are pretty simple things. Basically you can click on the link 
at the top of the page "edit this page" and it brings it up in a textbox 
you can edit. If you aren't sure about the changes you have made you
can click on "preview changes" - when you are happy with your changes 
click on "save page".

All wikis do is use symbols you type to determine what formatting to do 
- some examples

~~~~ is automatically replaced by your username and date - this is how 
you sign things in the
wiki world. When you put your name on the contributors page notice my 
entry - all I did was type
* Mark Horner ( ~~~~ )
and it put my username and stuff in automatically.

''italicised text'' - double single quotes make text italics
'''bold text''' - triple single quotes make text bold
''''bold italicised text'''' - quadruple single quotes make text bold 
and italicised

To make a bulleted list
* list itme
* list item
** sublist item
*** sub-sublist item
*** sub-sublist item

To make a numbered  list
# list itme
# list item
## sublist item
### sub-sublist item
### sub-sublist item

Now if you want a new section or a new page you just put in a reference 
to it even if it doesn't exist and
then it will appear in red - when you click on it after saving the page 
that references it - the new page will
automatically be created! So all pages that we want to be part of FHSST 
Biology need to be declared like this

[[FHSST_Biology:MyNewPage|The link to the new page]]

Then when you save it'll show up in red and you can just click on it and 
it will automatically take you to the
edit page for the new page.

At the bottom of the edit page is a link to "Editing help" - which is 
comprehensive and has a large table
with all the formatting - so everything is easy to lookup.

Those are the very basic things for editing a wiki - its really very simple.

So now we need to actually replace the index page with proper Biology 
chapters.

I propose we come up with a chapter outline and then start each one with 
all the syllabus requirements and then people can start filling things in.

Comments/complaints/suggestions?

Cheers,

Mark