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How To Get An Account so you can Contribute

1. Click "Request Account". Fill in your "RealName" (no spaces), email, political party-state (ie. R-IA), write at least 50 words about yourself. Optional: upload your resume. Click to verify your email.

2. Go to your email folder on your phone or computer and click on the first link which this website sent you.

3. It will take you back here where you can submit your request for approval by a SAVETHEWORLD administrator. Click "create your account".

4. When a genuine human finds your request, and see you are a genuine human, he will approve your request and email you a temporary password. Click on the link, log in with the temporary password, change it to the password you want to keep, and your account is activated. One more step before you edit: go to "preferences" on the left, and confirm your email account AGAIN.

Your request for an account will NOT be rejected for disagreement about politics or religion. You CAN be rejected for not being a human. Or for imitating spam robots by peddling health, wealth, or lust.

If something doesn't work, please contact me, Dave Leach, at Biblewizard at) gmail.com or DaveLeach (at Saltshaker.US. Needed: volunteer computer wizard.

Want to read a more detailed description of how to get an account? See How To Get An Account - in Detail

RESOURCES

Rules are designed to facilitate productive dialog and limit hostility. Talk Tips are suggestions how to make your contributions persuasive. Forum#How to use the software shows a few cool things you can do with a little bit of code. Template has words and codes you can copy and paste. Forum#Ways you can contribute shows ways you can contribute: from the simplest - entering a comment on the "discussion" page, to adding corrections, more evidence, argument, etc to main pages, to starting new articles.

WHAT you can contribute, and HOW to do it

Add a comment on a "Discussion" page (Easiest)

No code required! This the most familiar way to contribute: it is like posting a "comment" after an ordinary article or blog, or in social media. The discussion page is most appropriate if your point is general, and not directed to any specific point on the article page.

How to do it: For each article, notice the list on the left edge of the screen. Half way down is the heading "This page". Under that is "Discussion". Click "Discussion". The page that takes you to will have the headline "Talk:" followed by the headline of the article. Click the "Edit" tab to the right of the title, or "Edit" in the list at the left edge of the screen. Write your comment!

Sign & Line On the next line after your comment, type (~~~~) (to identify you), and on the next line, (----) (dashes, not underlines, will create a horizontal line).

Review. Before you click "save", you might want to click "Review", which will show you what it will look like with the codes activated and not visible. Then "save".

(Why the ~'s and -'s? Those funny squiggles at the upper left of your keyboard (~) are called "tildes". Four of them will leave your SAVETHEWORLD "signature" when you finish editing, which will include your Real Name, the political party on your voter registration card, (or "N" if you are not a citizen), the two-letter abbreviation of your state (or country), and your phrase about yourself. The four dashes will leave a horizontal line across the screen, to separate your comment from other comments. (You don't HAVE to use that code. You can type it out if you would rather.)

(Weird Codes.You may be the first one to comment! If there are already several comments, you may see a bunch of weird codes with the text. Don't fear them. They are your slaves. But if you don't believe in slavery you don't HAVE to use them.)

Add your comment in the article itself, right next to what you are addressing (Easy)

Optional Code:

Four "tildes" (~~~~), those funny squiggles at the upper left of your keyboard;

Four dashes (----) (not underlines) will stretch a horizontal line across the screen.

EASY

Easy: You need to use a little bit of code to put it in the right place, and to separate your contribution from what you are improving.

Finding where to start: You get to the "Edit" screen by clicking the word "Edit" just right of each headline and each sub-headline. You can click "Edit" in the list on the left edge of the screen, but that takes you to the top of the page to edit the whole article. If you want to add much lower, you will want to click "edit" to the right of the first subheading above where you want to add.

Marking your territory. The best spot to add may be at the end of the paragraph that you want to address. After you decide where to contribute, mark it with 4 dashes, (----)which will put a horizontal line across the page after you finish editing. Go down a little bit and put another 4 dashes. Do your contributing between those two lines. Before the second line, type 4 tildes, (~~~~) which will add your signature (name, party, state, phrase about you) and time.

Headings. Begin with a word or phrase describing the nature of your contribution, such as "correction" if you are addressing an error so plain that you expect your correction will be widely accepted; "clarification" if you can explain the points made better; "addition" if you can make the point stronger with more information; "Evidence" if there are relevant facts you can document; argument" or "disagreement" if you have a different view which was not addressed but should be; Opinion if the value of your contribution is subjective.

VERY EASY: add a comment to the discussion page. No code required!

EASY: add your comment in the article itself, right next to what you are addressing. You need to use a little bit of code to put it in the right place, and to separate your contribution from what you are improving.

INTERESTING: Improve an article with correction, clarification, evidence, or new information. Use headings to make clear what type of contribution yours is. Make a decision whether to make it show in the table of contents at the beginning of the article, and if so, where in the TOC. Use formatting to make it look great: bold, italics, colors, indenting, links, pictures, videos.

FULFILLING: Become a SAVETHEWORLD administrator!

Required Code:

Boldface, '''Bold,''' for your heading. If you don't want the labor of typing the three apostrophes on either side of what you want to be "bold", just highlight your heading and then click the "B" on the top left of your edit area.

Horizontal Line, (----) to mark the top and bottom of your territory. You can type four dashes, or just click the horizontal line on the right of the code toolbox on the top left of your edit area.

Your Signature, 4 tildes, (~~~~), explained above.

Links [http://example.com] in case you want to support your reasoning with a link to another website.

Internal Links [[Example]] in case you want to link to another page on this website.

Interesting

In addition to your "Easy" possibilities, you can make a decision whether to make your contribution show in the table of contents at the beginning of the article, and if so, where in the TOC.

If what you want to say is very long - too long to fit in the existing article without disrupting its focus, yet relevant and important - you can put your complete content in a separate article which you can create from scratch, and add only a summary and link to the article that you want to address.

You can also make minor corrections to someone else's work.

You can use formatting to make it look great: bold, italics, colors, indenting, links, pictures, videos.

TOC. Go ahead and make your case! If you have very much to say, you might want to have it show up in the Table of Contents (TOC) at the top of the article. To do that, see how many equals signs are on each side of the subheading above where you are editing, and put one more than that on each side of your heading. If you do that, you don't need the horizontal line at the beginning of your contribution. Then just below the bottom line, quote the previous subheading followed with "- Continued".

Starting a New Article. Suppose you have started to make your point and realize you don't want to stop for several pages! Time for a separate article! Simply use the instructions to this point to make a summary of your point in the article you started addressing, and then make a link to your new article. Here's how you make the actual link: type the title you want of the new article, put two [[brackets]] on each side of it (or highlight it and click the Ab in the code toolbox at the upper left of your edit area) and "Save" your editing. After your editing box is closed and your edits saved, your article title will be activated. It will be red, indicating no article exists there yet. Click on it, and the website will take you to a new page where you can start writing your new article, which will already have a link to it from the article you began addressing. How cool is that?

Another way to start a new article is to type the title in the "search" box on the upper left of every page. Click "search" and the website will take you to the same empty page where you can start writing your article - but without a link to it from anywhere. You will have to add links later yourself.

Minor edits of others' material. If yours is a "minor edit" that doesn't add new information or change any meaning, such as correcting a typo, or grammar, or simplifying an awkward train of thought, you needn't sign your name to it. If you think your correction will be obviously better to anybody, just make the change. (A record of when you did it will be available to anyone who cares.) If there is any doubt whether the author might prefer his writing the way it is, another way to handle it is to put your clearer reading in [brackets].

Formatting.

The code tools in the code toolbox at the upper left of every edit screen are, from left to right: Bold, Italics, Internal link, External link, Embedded file (a photo, for which you might need special permission), File Link (not sure this works here), No Wiki (put this around wiki code and it won't activate the code but instead will let readers see it), and Horizontal Line.

Endless formatting possibilities are explained at MediaWiki.org.

OPTIONAL: Correcting a comment after you post it: the problem, and the opportunity

5. Another thing you can do here that you can't do with ordinary comments software, is change a comment after you have posted it. This creates the possibility of a small problem and a tremendous opportunity.

The small problem is that if you do it after someone else has already responded to what you are now changing, it could cause the response to not make sense. To eliminate that problem, please add, after or with your change, something like "(My comment used to say....)" In other words, just provide enough explanation so that the response to what you had said before can make sense.

The tremendous opportunity over traditional "comments" opportunities is that should one person in a comment stream persuade another, the one persuaded can more easily erase from his record all but a trace of what he now renounces. Consensus requires a lot of this, and the survival of civilization depends on more consensus.

Mind your own business

6. You will notice that when you are on the "edit" page, you have the power to edit other people's work. That doesn't mean you have the authority, any more than the power to grab candy off the store shelf without paying for it doesn't give you the authority to do it without unwelcome consequences.

On the discussion page you are authorized to make only three kinds of changes to the contributions of others: (1) fix obvious typos, (2) where grammar is very hard to understand (perhaps because the author's main language is not English) and you are sure what the author meant, you can insert corrected grammar [in brackets] after the poor grammar, and (3) if someone hits you with a "personal attack", you can grey it out. See Rules for how and when to do it.