Community:Contributor help

From Splunk Wiki

Want to add a note to a topic someone else wrote, or create your own topic? Read on.

Sign and date your contributions!

We want to know who you are! Splunk fans worldwide can't sing your praises if they don't know you were the one who added all that helpful information, so please sign and date your topic or update. To do this, just type four tildes (~) in a row on a line by themselves. When you do it, it looks like this:

Rachel 14:18, 19 November 2009 (PST)

Doing this also lets people know how fresh (or not-fresh) the topic is.

Editing an existing topic

Maybe you just want to add a note, or a comment on your experience with a particular issue. If you see an Edit link on a page, you can contribute to it:

• Make sure you're logged in to your splunk.com account.
  • Click Login in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
  • If you don't have an account, click Sign up.

• Once you're logged in, click Edit above the topic. and use the MediaWiki markup language (external link to Wikipedia reference) when adding your text.

Adding a new topic

Maybe you want to write up how you solved a problem, post a script you wrote to share with other Splunk users, or explain a concept you found particularly helpful, you can create your own topic. You do this by adding a link to it on an existing page:

• Log into your splunk.com account as described for editing existing topics.
• Go to the page you want to add a topic to, and click Edit at the top.
• Create a link to your topic by typing two left brackets, the name you want to give your topic (with underscores where the spaces should be), and two right brackets, like so:

[[here_is_my_new_topic_name]]

More options for linking in MediaWiki are described here (external link to Wikipedia's help page about links).

• Once you've made a link to your new topic, save the page the link is in. You'll notice that the link is red.
• Click on your new red link. It'll take you to an empty page, ready for you to fill with your awesome information!. Click Edit on the page, and use the information here (external link to Wikipedia's MediaWiki syntax help page) to format it.

Commonly-used MediaWiki markup syntax

For the most part, you can just type in what you want to say, but if you want to add a little structure to your writing, here are some options:

Adding section titles (sometimes called headings)

To add headings, put equals (=) signs around the heading text, the same number on each side. The more equals signs you use, the lower the level of heading--so using two equals is a second-level heading, three is a third, etc. Make sure you have the same number on each side.

Bullets

To use bullets, start a new line with an asterisk (*) and a space, and then the text you want for the bullet. To add a second-level (indented) bullet, use two asterisks in a row.

The motherlode

More details on Mediawiki markup are here (external link to Wikipedia's documentation).