optimizing your wiki experience

[LociOiling]

There's a lot of new and updated content on the Foldit wiki. OK, we'll never have as many pages as the Marvel Database, but just wait 'til the Foldit movie is released. (Bradley Cooper plays David Baker…you heard it here first.)

Speaking of moving images, Bruno Kestemont pointed out that the video ads inserted by our friends at Fandom (formerly known as Wikia) tend to distract from our content.

I had to resort to using Microsoft Edge to see exactly what he's talking about, but yes, it's pretty ugly.

Fortunately, there's a solution. In my regular browser, Firefox, I use an add-on (extension) called Adblock Plus. That takes care of the video adds on the wiki. You'll still see lots of Fandom links like "Who are the Gray Jedi?", but no videos in the middle of our content.

Adblock Plus took a hit a couple of years ago when they made a deal to whitelist Taboola links. But it's easy to turn off the Taboola links with a setting, and even with Taboola, you're way ahead of the game. (Just uncheck "allow some non-intrusive adveristing" under filter preferences to get rid of Taboola, etc.)

We're still a fish out of water in Fandom land, but I don't think we'll be moving anytime soon. It turns out our little wiki is the #1 featured hit if you google "hydropathy index". And, of course, we're also #1 for "Foldit Lua functions". No way could we leave all that behind.

[jeff101]

I think if you make an account for the Foldit wiki pages,
you can not only login to make changes to its pages,
but you can also login and browse them faster.

[LociOiling]

Good point, @jeff101, creating an account on the foldit.wikia.com has some advantages, especially if you edit pages:

• lets us know who you are (if use your Foldit screen name)
• avoids exposing your IP address (anonymous edits are listed by IP)
• enables you to follow pages (keep tracks of changes to pages you've created or updated, etc.)
• allows you to switch the default editor

The default "visual" editor may be OK for minor changes, but it's kind of limited. Also, I had some persistent problems trying to add images with the visual editor.

In your wiki profile, you can switch to the source editor under My Preferences -> Editing. "My Preferences" is available via the drop-down triangle next to the user image at the top of each wiki page.

Otherwise, for an existing page, select the source editor via the drop-down triangle next to the "Edit" button. For a new page, you'll get a blank page in the visual editor. Cancel out of that, then select the source editor from the "Edit" drop-down.

The source editor works with wiki markup, which is basically what wikipedia uses.

Speaking of wikipedia, I found out that you can link to wikipedia pages as if they were part of the Foldit wiki by adding the "wikipedia:" namespace, for example:

[[wikipedia:Levinthal's_paradox|Levinthal's paradox]]

The double brackets "[[" and "]]" enclose an internal link. The part after "wikipedia:" is the last part of the wikipedia URL. The part after the vertical bar "|" (also known as the "pipe" character) is the text that will appear on the page.

Use the double brackets for links to pages on the Foldit wiki. For internal links, you can skip the underscores, and you don't have to use the pipe character and alternate link text. For example, you can type:

[[Selection Interface]]

instead of:

[http://foldit.wikia.com/wiki/Selection_Interface Selection Interface] 

You'll also find the source editor has an auto-completion feature for internal links. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes you end up typing anyway. You turn off this "link suggest" feature in your editing preferences if it gets in your way too much.