Help:Contents

Under Construction
The Help pages here at The Louverture Project are under development, and may remain so for some time. (Unless someone wants to take this on as a project... hint, hint.) Fortunately, though, TLP runs on MediaWiki software, and there is an extensive collection of help pages posted both at Wikipedia and at WikiMedia. Below are some quick links to helpful resources, both at this site and the Wikipedia/WikiMedia sites.

Please see...
 * FAQs – what a wiki is and how to use it.
 * Help pages at Wikipedia – answers to editing and usage questions.
 * User's Guide – usage and configuration help
 * How do I...? – how to complete certain tasks on TLP.
 * Community Portal – what you can do and where to find things.
 * The Sandbox – try out your wiki editing skills.
 * Why "The Louverture Project"? – the inspiration behind this project.

Many people who visit a Wiki for the first time have questions about vandalism, disinformation, and other problems endemic to letting anyone in the world re-write your site. We won't go into depth about such concerns here as there has been extensive discussion on these issues at wikis worldwide. For responses to some common objections, see this page at Wikipedia.

Reading
Orientation and Navigation

The Louverture Project is part encyclopedia, part narrative, part resource and part archive. There are at least three main ways for the visitor to interact with the site:


 * 1) Read the Narrative - Currently under heavy development The Revolution Will Be Forgotten is envisioned as a popular history of the Haitian Revolution.  Select a chapter from the Main Page of the wiki and start reading.  Links within the narrative will take you to pages of more detail about various topics, whether here at The Louverture Project or elsewhere.  A Haitian Revolution Primer is also available to provide an overview for those new to the history.
 * 2) Browse by Category - The list of categories is also available from the Main Page.  Within each category is a growing list of articles about people, events, and concepts having to do with the Haitian Revolution.
 * 3) Search the Site - Enter a term in the Search box on the left-hand side of the page, then click "Go" or "Search."  "Go" will take you directly to a page, if it exists on the site, while the "Search" button will return a list of all pages containing the search term.

For more, see the Readers' Guide at MediaWiki.

Editing
For now, please see WikiMedia's User's Guide and Editing Help page for instructions on formatting.

One thing I'd like to make sure we do at TLP is to cite sources. I'll be developing Help:Citing Sources Guidelines for this Wiki, but in the meantime, we'll follow the Cite Sources page at Wikipedia.

Caveat Editor: A wiki only grows by community participation, so please feel free to dig in and edit or add to pages as you see fit. However, please note that, for a variety of practical reasons, the IP address of the computer you're using will be logged along with your edit, and will be displayed beside your edit in the history page. This allows the site administrators to, for instance, block users who vandalize pages. If you register, though, only your chosen nickname will appear beside your contributions. For many people, such as those who are assigned an IP address dynamically by their ISP, this will not be an issue, but if you're concerned, please consider registering, or email stuart at thelouvertureproject.org to discuss further concerns or options. (Replace the word "at" with the "@".)