User:Fabartus/Snooping tour

Snooping tour
&emsp;Anyway, I was snooping one day when greeting a newcomer like you and saw this edit. It inspired the following mini-tutorial: &emsp;Here's a few tips (Call it Frank's five cent tour) in the form of a pop quiz: What happens when someone tries 'SDI' in the search/navigation line? (1) Try it... Follow the 'lists of' (category) link. Follow it's category link. Note where you are, and look around. (2) Type the word disambigulation in the search/nav window. Not too good... Well, if you look long and hard you might find the associated category (cat)... it should be there somewhere. But generally there's a faster way. So let's try another indirect approach. (3) Return to the SDI (article) page, look at and for it's template (have to go into an edit window for that). Replace the pagename in the URL with the string: 'Template:template's name' and keep the '&edit' on the end... hit enter. (Can do that in the nav/search line too, but not to edit mode. The syntax is the same. try both until you know how to look at a template either way. You'll need to figure that out now and then.) &emsp;  Now if you're user preferences are set to preview before edit, you'll see the template documentation, the template 'Guts', and a category; if you don't see that, then preview the window. (4) Now follow that cat link. Navigate around til you find the cat found above, and the related category. (5) I haven't seen whether you've ever aliased a term by building a redirect, but someday you'll certainly have to. (6) So now go find the template (you'll have to navigate a page or two). &emsp;Such templates are supposed to be placed after the closing ']' on the same line on redirect pages, and there are loads of reasons and kinds for doing that, including some that have aliased names... including upper and lower case variations, and alternate/alternative wordings, and alternative spellings. Those 'aliased versions' should all do the same auto-categorization... which is a frequent common job for many types of templates. So not surprisingly, some redirects may need two and sometimes three 'R from' type templates. Templates are used instead of hard coding a category, as category names change sometimes. This allows all tagged pages to change to the new category in one single edit--in the template. &emsp;That concludes Frank's five cent tour... but you may want to bookmark some of those categories. I'll tack a couple of other 'goodies categories' in below my sig by using a couple of other templates there. You should be able to find the one's I used above, and a real flexible navigation type template called 'succession' used on Honorverse in those places. (take a good hard look at this section in edit mode!) Poke around and have fun! (Just don't save any thing when looking under the hood, so to speak! ) // Fra nkB
 * Snooping is a time honored tradition here on wikipedia... took me the darndest long time to get over that. It's expected, and in some ways, wiki's rely on such for people to climb their learning curves, and in many ways, there are things you won't find out about with shedding any inhibitions on that, so do it. I know my own knowledge grew much faster after I gave in to the necessity. See for example ... where you may be amazed, saddened, amused, or all three, on any given visit.


 * Ten: ways to get the same five useful places... and one besides.
 * Handy:Tools for odd jobs Special:UncategorizedTemplates