Intern Instructions

This page provides instructions for interns, offering assistance on how to use MediaWiki (the free web app both Wikipedia and this wiki are built on), as well as guidance on ongoing development of this project. The Chinese Grammar Wiki project is a big undertaking, but it will meet a very real need. There is no single, comprehensive, free resource for Chinese grammar on the internet. We're going to be the first to the space, and we're going to kick ass doing it. By contributing to this project, you're not only improving your Chinese, but you're also earning a place among the honored contributors to this wiki. In the future, we'll have famous professors using and possibly even contributing to the Chinese Grammar Wiki, so it's good to get in now!

Key Objectives

Comprehensive and Interlinked. The goal here is to become the resource for Chinese grammar online. Just like Wikipedia is the place you naturally turn to for general information, and you often find yourself "falling down the rabbit hole" following link after link, that's what we want to be for Chinese grammar.

Referenced to Existing Textbooks. That said, we know that Chinese learning is currently dominated by traditional education. Textbooks and classrooms are going to be an important part of most students' Chinese studies for some time to come. For that reason, we want to offer an "easy in" for students of specific textbooks by providing grammar indexes of their current textbooks. This way they can bookmark the page that corresponds to their own textbook, then click on any grammar point they'd like extra explanation for, more examples, or even just related grammar points.

Clear and Accessible. Because the vast majority of learners of Chinese are beginners, this grammar wiki needs to be generally accessible to beginners (although over time, it will also expand to include more and more advanced topics). It needs to be written in a clear and straightforward manner, but also include the grammatical terms many textbooks use as a reference so that the learner can draw connections between the information in different sources.

Issues to Be Aware of

There are several main issues to be aware of:

1. DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. We're going to make extensive references to other textbooks and materials, but this must always be done in the proper academic way, either by restating points in a new way (hopefully simpler and clearer), or by giving proper credit in true academic spirit. DO NOT PLAGIARIZE.
2. AllSet Learning is investing time and money into this project, but it will be a freely available online resource. The one way AllSet Learning can recoup some of its investment is by placing Amazon affiliate links to the various books referenced on the grammar wiki. All links to books must use the proper Amazon Affiliate link so that AllSet Learning gets credit for the sales it generates, and the project can continue indefinitely.
3. In true wiki spirit, this is a collaborative effort. However, editing will not be allowed for anonymous visitors, and editing positions must be approved. We're a small team, and we expect to get a lot of attention for this project soon, but we don't have the resources to deal with online vandals and haters. Not just anyone can become an editor, but we certainly welcome recommendations and applications, post-launch. (Pre-launch, please talk to John personally if you'd like to recommend a new editor.)

Editing MediaWiki

It's easy to edit MediaWiki content, but you have to know the conventions. If you know any HTML, it's similar, but even simpler. (We will also use some HTML in our wiki content, which is also compatible with MediaWiki's own markup.)

As for the markup, here are two very handy references:

• Wikipedia: FAQ/Editing
• Wikipedia: Cheatsheet
• Wikipedia: Article title format
• Templates (advanced editing): on Wikipedia, on MediaWiki

Some common editing tasks you need to be able to handle for our purposes are:

1. Create a new page
2. Create a redirection page
3. Create subheadings
4. Create internal links
5. Create internal links with different link text
6. Create external links
7. Create AllSet Learning's Amazon affiliate links
8. Add italics or bold
9. Create ordered and unordered lists
10. Create tables
11. Add images
12. Add categories to pages

Remember: one of the easiest ways to figure out how to do something on this wiki is to just find an existing example of what you want to do, click "Edit" to look at the markup, then copy and modify as needed. (Most of the editing tasks above are included in this very page.)

Citing Sources

When citing a specific portion of a particular source, use the built-in "references" function (which works like footnotes):

1. Enclose the footnote in "ref" tags, HTML style
2. Make sure you add the "references" tag to the bottom of the article, right above the "Sources" section
3. The information within the "ref" tag should automatically appear at the bottom of the article, hyperlinked
4. For an example of this in action, check out the Word Order article, and look under "The Basic SOV Sentence"

When citing sources in general and further reading:

1. Include chapter names/numbers, and page numbers, if possible
2. Before links to sources, include what type of information you're linking to, for example "textbook," "grammar book," "Wikipedia," "blog entry," etc. (example: Word Order). This will save visitors the annoyance of clicking on a link, expecting to find immediate information, and then just landing on an Amazon product page.

Special Editing Issues for the CGW

One important note is that this wiki will not do the hand-holding that many "learn Chinese online" sites do of providing pinyin and English for every single damn character. This is a waste of our resources, since there are already some very functional free browser plugins out there which can accomplish the same purpose (see our Tools page). That said, on a page specifically about a certain word or phrase, the pinyin should be given in parentheses at the top of the page, in the first mention of the word (and then not repeated).

Also, we will be following Wikipedia's convention of using only English or toneless pinyin for page titles. You can use Chinese for page titles on Wikipedia, and we will be adding many, but they will all redirect to another page with an English title (example: 的). This will prevent a lot of confusion down the road. This rule will require further clarification at some point in the future, but for now we'll keep it simple.

When adding tables (for example, in the Word Order article), follow these guidelines:

1. Unless you have a good reason not to, use the wikitable class (again, see the Word Order article and look at the markup if you're unclear how to do that), which has been modified for our purposes
2. Specify the width in the table "style," using 10em per table column as a general rule (e.g. a 3-column table would be 30em wide)

Most of this section will be created later. Basically, pages with Chinese sample sentences will have some special CSS added through span tags, and the Chinese text in the span tags will also be subject to certain formatting rules. More on this later!

Final Note to Interns

This page is for you, so whatever is not clear and needs to be expanded upon, you guys can help us do! Eventually this page will morph into an AllSet Learning Chinese Grammar Wiki guidelines page, but for now it's for you. Let John know what else needs to be clarified.