Pensapedia:Basic navigation

How to navigate Pensapedia

Pensapedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenced.

Where you see text like this, it means there is a link to some relevant article or Pensapedia page with further information elsewhere if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will often show you where a link will take you. These links mean that articles do not need to cover common ground in depth; instead, you are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached.

There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external web sites and pages, and reference material. At the end of the article are relevant categories of knowledge which you can search and traverse in a loose hierarchy for further related information in a field. Links to external sites are signified by a different shade of blue and a special "external link" icon, like this.

Some articles may also have links that appear in a different shade of blue, but without the external link icon, like this. These are links to relevant articles at the Wikipedia project.

You can add further links if a relevant link is missing; this is one way to contribute.

Main Page

There's a browsing bar at the top of the Main Page with links to Categories, Portals and the A-Z index. Each category is a list of sub-categories or articles. Portals bring you to sub-portals and portals, which are illustrated article summaries like on the Main Page. A-Z index finds a page from the first two or three letters of its title.

Contents and index browsing

Pensapedia contains a huge amount of information on all sorts of Pensacola-related subjects ranging from government, history and culture to everything and anything in between.

To help you find your way around this world of knowledge, Pensapedia has many pages that organize its contents. These lists and indices use links to the articles that are organized by subject or alphabetically. Our best content also finds its way to one of the featured content lists.

Sidebar (left)

To the side of each article are some standard options for navigation and tools:

Navigation

• Main Page - the Pensapedia home page
• Community portal - a portal for Pensapedia users to discuss site issues
• Current events - latest area news with links to relevant articles
• Recent changes - a list of all the recent article edits, uploaded files and other changes
• Random page - lucky dip, if you're ever bored or want to learn something new!
• Help - links to the "Help" section's table of contents
• Donations - ways to help support the project financially

Search

The search box allows you to search other articles in Pensapedia. In modern browsers, typing the first few letters will bring up a list of articles that begin with those letters.

Toolbox

• What links here - useful for tracing where this article is referenced from.
• Related changes
• Upload file - how you add images (and occasionally other files) to Pensapedia
• Special pages - all the special functions and administration options can be found here.

Top tabs (above the article)

Each page in Pensapedia contains an article and a discussion page (usually called "Talk").

You can see these above: the article is labeled "project page", the discussion page is the tab to the right of it. These are treated as two separate pages in Pensapedia, but are shown side by side on the tab bar, for ease of use.

Whether you are looking at the article or project page, or the discussion page, you will see there is a button marked "edit this page", possibly a button "+", and a button labelled "watch" or "unwatch".

• Edit this page - this is the key to contributing to Pensapedia. When you click this button, you change from viewing an article or discussion about an article, to being able to edit the article, or add comments to the discussion that is going on.

Occasionally, pages that are important or may be vandalized are locked, in which case the "edit" will show "view source", and you will not be able to edit the article at that time.

Page editing is simple with Pensapedia, and you cannot harm a page if you make a mistake, since all changes can be undone. This is part of Pensapedia's vandal protection.

• "+" - adds a new section to a page, without changing what is already there.

• Watch/unwatch - adds or removes a page from your watchlist, the list of pages you are tracking. You can view your watchlist with the user option button "my watchlist" at the top right of the screen.

User options (top right)

These control your user account. To create a user account you only need to choose a name and a password. An email address is optional and only used for password reminders.

Unless you create an account you will not be able to customize Pensapedia preferences for yourself. Almost all experienced editors use an account in order to ensure accountability.

The user options also include links to view your watchlist (articles you are tracking), and contributions you have made.