Help:Navigation

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Revision as of 16:01, 8 July 2009 by Puppy101 (talk | contribs) (Other Panels and Navbars)
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This is part of the Utopia WIKI Help Guide Series.

This Page references Utopia Wiki's official guide to Navigation. Please use common sense.



Finding articles and site functions


Basic navigation in Wikipedia

Main Page

There's a browsing bar at the top of the Main Page with links to Categories, Portals that have been categorized and the A-Z index.

Each category is a list of sub-categories or articles. A-Z index finds a page from the first two or three letters of its title.

Category browsing

Every article aims to belong to a category. Each of these categories can be browsed from the Table of Contents.

For more information about using this feature, see Category FAQ/UtoWiki Help.


Other Panels and Navbars

Sidebar (left)

To the left side of each article are some standard options for game link-navigation and interaction, as well as the toolbox option and wiki links.

Utopia Wiki Navigation options:

Search box - allows you to search other articles across the whole of Wikipedia.

Gameplay Navigation options:

  • Play utopia - brings you to the Utopia Front page.
  • Utopia Blog - directs you to the Official OMAC Utopia Blog where we receive updates and developmental plans from Sean & Brian
  • Utopia Forums - portal to the Joltonline Utopia Forums.

Utopia WIKI Navigation options:

  • Guides
  • Tutorials
  • Strategy
  • Formula - directs to the category page for Formulas
  • Tools - directs to the category page for Tools
  • External Sites

Toolbox options:

  • What links here - useful for tracing where this article is referenced from
  • Related changes - list of changes made recently to pages linked from the specified page
  • Upload file - help with properly uploading images and other files to Wikipedia
  • Special pages - all the special functions and administration options can be found here


Top tabs (above the article)

Each page in Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia. 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 Wikipedia, and you cannot harm a page if you make a mistake, since all changes can be undone. This is part of Wikipedia's vandal protection.
  • "new section" - adds a new section to a discussion page, without changing what is already there.
  • history - All editable pages on Wikipedia 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. See Help:Page history for details.
  • 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. See Help:Watching pages for details.

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.

Navigate using WikiBrowser

WikiBrowse is a set of open source tools for Windows that are designed for navigating Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites. WikiBrowse includes tools and multimedia players.