I'm off to do some napping (starting to lose my head to sleepiness) and more researching. As I'm not terribly good with the coding, if anyone wants to fill in for me, I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance. (Also if anyone would offer some help as far as the coding, I'd appreciate it mightly.)
Drought / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Drought.
OK, gather round kids - it's lesson time. ;)
You used the following code:
A [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought | drought]]] is the result of little or no rainfall occuring over months, years, or longer time periods, causing general suffering of creatures and damage to the environment. Drought can cause crops to fail, water levels to lower, and [[[http://www.phenomenica.com/2009/11/man-eating-lions-consumed-35-people-in.html | can decimate animal populations]]] causing an upset in the natural balance. As a culmination of these effects, drought can lead to diseases spreading amongst the population, famine, [[[fire | fires]]] due to aridity of land, and [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storms | dust storms]]].
Droughts can [[[http://www.discoveryon.info/2010/11/stone-age-engravings-discovered-in.html | reveal artifacts previously unknown]]], can cause [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_migration | mass migrations]]] due to unavailability of water and food, can cause desertification, and can be a [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee | factor during war]]].
++ Sources
[[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus | The Exodus]]]
[[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification | Desertification]]]
[[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation | Overpopulation]]]
[[bibliography]]
[[[http://en.wikipedia.org | Wikipedia]]]
[[[http://www.phenomenica.com | Phenomenica]]]
[[[http://www.discoveryon.info | Discovery Online]]]
[[/bibliography]]
First of all, there are two different types of links in Wikidot.com wikis - internal links like this one
[[[fire | fires]]]
which go to another page within the same wiki, and external ones like this one:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storms | dust storms]
Unlike internal links, external links use only a single square bracket instead of three.
In general, external links should not be used within the main text without a very good reason - that's what the Bibliography block is for.
Looking at your text, you use far more external links than you need, and none of the truly useful links are within the Bibliography block. I'd revise the bibliography block like this:
[[bibliography]]
: wk : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought Drought Wikipedia entry]
: phen : [http://www.phenomenica.com/2009/11/man-eating-lions-consumed-35-people-in.html Man-eating lions consumed 35 people in 1898] @ Phenomenica.com
: disc : [http://www.discoveryon.info/2010/11/stone-age-engravings-discovered-in.html Sone Age Engravings discovered in Amazon basin]
[[/bibliography]]
So, what are the "wk", "phen", and "disc" abbreviations at the start of each line for? Using these, you can refer to the articles in the main text, like this:
Drought can cause crops to fail, water levels to lower, and can decimate animal populations[((bibcite phen))]
I'm kicking out your existing bibliography block, since it only links to the start pages of the referred websites, and none of them have information specific to droughts. And I'm also converting the links on top of the bibliography block to internal links under a "See Also" header, as well as converting the external links within the main text to internal links - even though none of them have active target pages (which is why they appear in red), they would make valid Arcana Wiki entries. Finally, I converted the first mention of the word "drought" into bold text, like this:
**drought**
I hope this helps you - click on "edit" to take a look at the code as it is now. You can do the same with other pages to see how they are done as well.
Oh, and I also corrected a spelling mistake. ;)
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My mother would kill me if she knew I was mispelling and using the wrong sources for my bibliography. With good reason (I should remember that kind of stuff), as she's an English teacher. :) Please don't tell her.
Also, thank you, I think I've got the hang of it and if anything will attempt to reference this page for future edits. I still don't quite get the meta links that happened with my other edit (Volcanic eruptions) where the parent page was set to Volcano. Hopefully I can learn quickly from the helpful tutorials though.
The Parent Page thing is found in the menu at the bottom of the page: Click +Options and then Parent from the row of buttons that appears after you click. Then type in the name of an appropriate 'higher level' page - the wiki will offer sugggestions as you type, but you can only parent from pages that already exist.
/forum/t-292690/drought#post-
