VOpedia.com Tutorial No. 1 “Creating Your Own Wiki Page”

Good morning Folks,

Today I decided to writeup a tutorial for people interested in adding themselves or their companies to the Voiceover Wiki – VOpedia.com

In the past 9 or so days since I launched the site quite a few people have joined and added their pages… but I believe many haven’t because they don’t have much experience with the WikiMedia system.

This Tutorial is for beginners… some parts of it might be way too simple to those more computer savvy but I decided not to skip anything so as to make this first tutorial as comprehensive as possible.

Step One : Create An Account

Although Wikipedia proper will allow you to add content to their pages without having an account. I don’t allow that so if you would like to add a page to the Voiceover Wiki you will need to first create an account.

To do that you will need to first go to http://www.vopedia.com then click the link on the top right hand corner of the page labeled “Create Account”

The system will then take you to the “Log in / Create account” page. If you already have an account … this is where you log in from. If you don’t have an account then click the “Create An Account” link on the top of the “Log in” box on that page

That will take you to the “Create account” page.  You will need to fill out a Username, a Password and include your email in there to verify your account. This is so that no one creates an account for you without your permission.

Once that is done a verification email will be automatically sent to you through the system.

Step Two: Creating Your Page

Today coincides with the passing of one of my favorite Canadian Comedians (not since John Candy have I felt this loss) Leslie Nielson.

Leslie had an amazing and very distinctive voice and would have made a brilliant voice actor. So to commemorate his passing I’ll use his name as the example for creating a page on the Voiceover Wiki System.

So, to create a page on the VOpedia.com system you will need to first be logged into your vopedia account. As you can see from the image below I am logged into mine (I am the admin so my account is Admin).

Once I am logged in I will type up the name of the page that I want to create into the search box in the top right hand side of the page and click go. I know that there is no page called Leslie Nielson on my system so I know that the system will ask if I want to create that page.

As I mentioned there is no page called Leslie Nielson on the VOpedia.com wiki so it will ask me [Create the page”Leslie Nielson” on this wiki!] and the link will be in red.

It is important to note that any link you find on the wiki that is in red means that the page does not exist.

Since I want to create a page called Leslie Nielson on my wiki I click the red link and it will bring up a new page with an edit box in it. The edit box is where you will insert the information that will appear on your page.

Step Three: Using The Right Template

Currently there are three standard templates that I ask wiki contributors to use when adding a page. This is to standardize the look of the system and not have pages appear more like adverts or personal appeals. I don’t mind if people add their contact information but that goes at the end of the article and the other relevant information will reside within the section headings within the template.

To use the template code you will first need to see which template applies to you… If you are a voice actor then you use the voice actor template, if you are a company or agency then you use that template and if you are a blog, magazine, or vo related site (like vo-bb.com or the voiceovers forums) then you use the voiceover site template.

You can find links to these three templates on the main page of the wiki.

I suggest that you open a new browser window and type in http://www.vopedia.com then on the from page at the bottom left pick click on the relevant template.

In this case we clicked on “Voice Actor Template” which brings up the page.

To access the formatting code for that page (or the template’s code if you will) you will need to click the “Edit” link in the top right hand side of the page.

This will give you access to the code that makes up the way the page looks.

Once you click the edit button (actually the link you will see will be “View Source” thanks to Carol from govoices.com for bringing that to my attention,  as the admin only I see the edit page…. so yeah click the “view source” link instead)  the page will display an edit box containing the code that makes up that page. I have locked that page which means that you cannot edit the Voice Actor template… but you can copy the code. Click inside the box and click CTRL+A to select all the text in the edit box (Command + A on the mac) once you have selected the text it will look like this:

Now after you copy the code from the Template’s page go back to the window that has the page you are creating and paste that code into your page’s edit box.

Step Four: Edit The Content

Once you have copied the code from the template page into your own page you will then need to edit the parts I have highlighted in Yellow in the image below to include your information. I suggest you write this information in advance and have it ready in a document so you can just cut and paste it in.

The structures I am using are to standardize the system so if you would like to add a section or change one of the headings please do so. But try to keep the code the same (don’t delete the = signs because these are what the system reads to indicate headings). Once you are done just click Save page… and that’s it! You’ve created your very own wiki page successfully.

I hope this tutorial helped you to create your own wiki page, if you have any questions please send them to me through the contact page on my blog or leave them in the comment section below.

There are tons of other things you can add to your page… like a picture and an infobox … to see an example of that please check out the Voices.com page for how company pages can look … or Jodi Krangle and Andy Boyns‘ respective pages.

I’ll write up a slightly more advanced set of tutorials in the weeks to come… but hopefully this will give you an idea of how to create your own page.