Getting Started

Welcome to the Australian Traditional Music History Archive.

This site is a Wiki, a website that allows users to collaboratively edit it. If you've not used a wiki before, you may want to have a look at the What are Wikis, and Why Should You Use Them? and Wikipedia Wiki pages. More specifically, this site is powered by the Mediawiki software (used on Wikipedia, the Traditional Tune Archive and many other sites).

Using This Wiki

Anyone is welcome to browse the content on this wiki. To find pages of interest you can look at:

• the list of All Pages
• browse pages by their Category tag
• search for pages containing the specified words in either their title or body by using the Search Box in the navigation area on LHS

More on the Wiki Layout and Features

When viewing any page, there are several tabs visible over the main displayed content. The history tab shows you a list of changes made to the page, who by, and why. The other tabs are not really useful for most site users.

On the Left-Hand Side of the wiki is a navigation area. This starts with a list of links to useful pages on the site, including links to the Main_Page, All Pages, Browse by Category, Newest Pages, Recent Changes, and finally this Getting_Started page. Next there is search box, where you can enter some text you want to find in either page titles or their contents. Finally there is the tools section with utility links. The most useful of these is the Printable version link to display the current page in a form suitable suitable for printing or saving as a PDF. The other items are not really useful for most site users.

Some pages may have an embedded audio player linked to an audio file (usually mp3), that looks as follows:

Star of County Down - computer gen - 80bpm This will display in any reasonably recent browser. You can use the player controls to play the audio file, or click on the player to access the menu to download the file.

Contributing to This Wiki

Registered Users are able to edit or create pages on this site. User accounts are available upon request to the site managers for collectors of traditional Australian Music. Not that you have a common username and password across the companion history and tunes sites. Once you have an account, you need to login to the site using the login link on the upper RHS. You will then have access to the edit features.

Editing Pages

To content on a wiki, you Edit the relevant page. This will place you in the wiki page editor. On this site, most pages are free text articles, possibly with links to uploaded images. The page content uses a special markup style know as wikitext. To find out more about the wikitext markup used on these pages, have a look at Lawrie's guide to Getting Started Editing Wiki Pages. There are other links on the Help:Contents page.

The usual edit process goes as follows:

• you make some initial changes to the window wikitext content
• you enter a brief "Summary" message that will appear in the page history giving a brief idea of why you're editing the page (which helps other users know what you've been doing on the page)
• you select "Show preview" to see the effect of your changes
• you say "bugger" because its not quite right, so you tweak your changes to the page content
• you select "Show preview" to see the effect of your new changes
• repeat above make change & preview cycle until satisfied with the new page content
• select "Save page" to commit the changes to the page, which others can then view

Your wikitext can include links to other pages on this site (or on the companion tunes site, as described below). It can also include links to external web pages, all done using the standard wikitext link tags described in the references quoted above.

To include an embedded audio player, linked to an audio file (usually mp3), along with a caption below, as shown above, you need to include code that looks as follows::

 <html5media>http://members.ozemail.com.au/~laswift/Session_Experience_Web/audio/StarofCountyDown80.mp3</html5media>
 <br><caption>'''Star of County Down - computer gen - 80bpm'''</caption>

If you want to link to tunes in the companion Tunes Archive, you can use the "interwiki" tag "austtradtune" in a link of the form:

[[austtradtune:Name of Tune|Link text to display (usually tune name)]]

Creating Pages

To create a new page, you should search for it by the name you wish to use. If it does not exist, you will be offered the option of creating the page, which you should select. You will then be in the page editor, and can entered the desired content as wikitext, as discussed above in the section on modifying existing pages.

Enjoy!