AFS Wiki booklet

From AFSWiki

An AFS Wiki booklet is a set of various wiki articles collected into a single entity. It's intended that, eventually, a booklet could be treated as an official AFS-USA handbook or manual, and able to be handed out as a single hard copy. A booklet allows articles to remain as separate entities which "own that topic of information," however enable tying various separate articles together into a larger collection. Different booklets may "pull" from some of the same articles. The primary benefit of keeping the articles separate is that updates to that information need only occur in the article-- the various booklets will automatically pull the latest information.

Contents 1 Background and purpose 2 How to Create an AFS Wiki booklet 2.1 Adding Articles to a new AFS Wiki booklet 2.2 Creating the new booklet 2.3 Adding articles to an existing AFS Wiki booklet 2.4 Quick notes on Booklets and Categories 3 Formatting and editing 4 See Also

Background and purpose

The software extension which creates the booklet is simply a tool to allow a "linking together" of a variety of disparate articles.

Example

Article 1: Medical Issues
Article 2: Travel
Article 3: Monthly Contact
...
A theoretical booklet titled: "Key Support Aspects"

If articles 1, 2, & 3 are all linked into the booklet "Key Support Aspects," then if anybody (staff or volunteer alike) wants to print out that booklet, then they only need go to the booklet page, and print.

Without the booklet software, the person printing these articles would have to go to each article, one-by-one-by-one and print each one out individually. As an added benefit, the booklet also automatically creates a table of contents for all the "chapters" and page numbers them. In essence, the booklet mimics all the handbooks and manuals that AFS currently mails to the volunteer base. However, (eventually) each section from each handbook is broken out into individual articles on the wiki, and then "stitched back together" via the booklet.

You're probably wondering, "well, why do I bother separating them out if I'm simply going to stitch them back together again anyway?" Good question! The answer is this:

Most of our handbooks/manuals/etc. duplicate content all over the place. How many different manuals and handbooks can you find the topic of "High and Low cycles of cultural adjustment?" I'm sure it's in (at least): Liaison handbook, Support coordinator handbook, Post-Arrival Orientation, and I think Mid-year orientation too. Probably more places as well. There are MANY, MANY topics like this which are duplicated, such as: medical issues, travel, you name it! It's duplicated somewhere.

In some cases, it's good to keep separate versions: for example the Host Family manual should probably need a slightly different version than the volunteer manual. That makes sense because the reader is different. However, in many cases, there is no reason whatsoever for them to be different. They should be linked. OR, they should come from the same original source. Perhaps, now you start to see the rationale for breaking things out into "topic-specific articles."

With "topic-specific articles," then any booklet you might want... be it liaison handbook, support coordinator handbook, or whatever, the information captured in the source article is the same information. It's always the latest, most up to date, most accurate information. The booklet is created "on the fly," so if Article 3 gets updated, then any new printings of the various booklets will automatically "pull" the updated information. When the technology can't do this for you automatically (such as various word documents all over the place with duplicated content), then a human being has to manually hunt around and make sure all the various documents are updated. It's a very slow, manual process that often is too burdensome to even bother doing. But the wiki concept, using the technology of the booklet, eliminates this issue. Laborious, tedious, document-updating drudgery, BEGONE!! ;-)

How to Create an AFS Wiki booklet

Adding Articles to a new AFS Wiki booklet

1. Identify which AFS Wiki articles are to be included in the booklet.
2. Organize the articles in numerical order. Each article will become a chapter in the booklet.
3. Prefix each article number 1 through 9 with a zero (this is due to alphabetic, not numeric sorting).
4. Append a zero to each article number.
5. Examples:
   • the third article in a booklet will be "030"
   • The sixth article will be "060"
   • The thirteenth article would be "130," and so on.

   The reason for the appended zero is to ease, at some time in the future, the insertion of a new article somewhere in the middle of the original order. This way, a new article can be inserted into the fourteenth position as "131" without having to re-number the articles already identified by "140" through "990."

6. Add the following tag to the bottom of each identified article. The form is as follows:

[[Category: Booklet name | article number ]]

• Per convention, the category tag should be added to the end of the wiki article.
• Also Note: The category name (booklet title) cannot contain any single quotes. In general, attempt to avoid special characters.

Creating the new booklet

• Clicking on the booklet/category name in one of the articles will allow you to create the top-level booklet information.
• To be used as a booklet, the category must be prefixed with:

{{booklet}}

• The booklet template is typically placed at the top.
• That's it!

Adding articles to an existing AFS Wiki booklet

Before adding any articles to an existing booklet, first consider the purpose of the existing booklet. If the existing booklet may pertain to matters of regulatory compliance, you may consider leaving the existing booklet unmodified, and instead create a new booklet to suit your needs.

Articles to be added to an existing booklet should be added in the following way:

1. Identify the current ordering of articles in the existing booklet (as described above).
2. Determine what number is best suited to insert your article into. Example:

   To insert an article between the 13th and 14th article:

   • The old thirteenth article will remain: 130 (no need to modify that number).
   • The old fourteenth article will remain: 140 (no need to modify that number either).
   • The article to be inserted into the new fourteenth article "slot" will be numbered: 131 (new number).
   • The article will then be inserted into the correct location in the booklet, without requiring updates of any other articles.

3. No other updates are required. Future printings of the booklet will include the added article in the order specified.

If this documentation is still unclear, please email Jeff Dooley.

Quick notes on Booklets and Categories

• Notice that ALL booklets are a type of category, but not all categories are a booklet.
• Categories are not exactly like a typical wiki article. They are a bit different.
  • To create a link to a category (or a booklet) page, type:

[[:Category:NAME | NAME]]

• Notice the colon preceding the word "Category."
• The name of the category/booklet then follows, and optionally, a more clear description/name of the page.

• For more extensive documentation on categories, see the mediawiki manual.

Formatting and editing

Most booklet formatting is handled by the article pages.

See Also

• A list of example booklets can be found at: Category: booklet