Contributing

Submitted by Jpfan01, minor additions by Toast

Welcome to the Goons with Spoons Recipe Submission Tutorial!

This page will hopefully help you in the process of submitting your first of many recipes here on the Goons with Spoons wiki.

Creation of Your Guide

The very first thing you will need to do is create a page for your recipe. If you look over to the left, where the menu is, you will see a search field. When you've decided on what you want to name your recipe as type it into the search field and press go like this:

If no one has used the same name as you for their recipe, typing your recipe's name into the search field will take you to a new screen informing you that the recipe's page has not been found. Next to that warning you will see an option that says you can create this page. Click create this page as shown below.

When you click the "create this page" link on this page, you will be taken to the main editing screen. This is where all the information for your entire recipe is saved, stored, and edited. All content needs to be entered into this screen. To make sure you are in the right place, the page should look just like this:

If this is not what you see, go back one step and make sure you clicked the "Create this page" link.

Now on to formating.

Categorizing

Now that you are at the edit page of your brand new entry submission, we need to add something, don't we? The first thing you will want to add in the entry window is the categories under which your recipe belongs. Categories in the edit field are entered in the form of:

[[category:Category Name]]

Many categories exist and you will most likely want to include your recipe in more than one. Some general categories include: Category:Recipes by Author, Category:Main Ingredients, Category:Recipes by Food Type, Category:Recipes by Meal, and by Category:Recipes by Cuisine.

So for example I could associate my recipe with my name (Jpfan01), then its cuisine type (Thai), then by the ingredient (Chicken), and finally the food type (Noodle). As an example, here is the category list I used for my Pad Thai Recipe so that you can see the formatting. Following the categories you will also want to add a "submitted by" entry as in the included example. Simply replace my name with yours.

Please be conservative when creating brand new categories. We don't need both "breaded chicken" and "chicken" categories in the ingredient section. If it is something no one else has used and it is key to the recipe, feel free to make a new category. Follow these guidelines and you're good to go:

• Pay close attention to spelling, and when creating a new category, please stick to existing naming conventions. For example, as a general rule the recipe categories are all singular; i.e. "Potato" not "Potatoes".
• When creating a new subcategory, remember to add its parent category into your entry. (i.e. add [category:Main Ingredients]] into your entry for "Celery".
• If you want to create a link to a category in the body of your recipe (for example see

   [[:category:Jpfan01's Recipes|Jpfan01]]) 

  the : before the first category is necessary. Otherwise the category will assign itself to the entire guide and leave a blank spot in your text. If you do it as written you get: Jpfan01

Formatting

Before we begin filling in the meat of your recipe I'd like to go over just a few formatting tips and techniques. Most recipes tend not to be composed of one part or stage in their creation. Some, for example, have a core meat component then a separate sauce component. For that we can create separate sections to divide the recipe up. Even nicer is that at the top of the page there will be a nice contents menu so people can skip around. At the top of this guide you can see an example of just that.

Creation and numbering of sections

Sections are created by creating their headers, as below:

==Section==

===Subsection===

====Sub-subsection====

Please do not use only one equals sign on a side (=text here=); this causes a title the size of the page name, which is taken care of automatically.

Text Effects and Bullets for Lists

Sadly wiki does not use the same vbcode that we are used to on the forums. Wiki has special code for things like italics or bold print or underlined words. To save yourself some time at the top of the edit page the first two buttons with a bold B and and italicized I are there for you to use. If you like to type it as you go and not use the buttons you can use these codes:

''Italicized Text Goes Here'' for italics it's double apostrophes on each side.
'''Bold text Goes here''' for bold print it's triple apostrophes on each side.

To add a bullet before any line simple use an asterisk * like so:

• List Item 1
• List Item 2

There are some other formatting tricks you can use if you like. Feel free to research the rest of them here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext

Standard HTML tags will also work for any of the above formatting. If you're more familiar with HTML you may find this easier than learning the quirks of Wiki formatting.

Now that the formatting stuff is out of the way lets get into the steps of writing an example recipe. The format we'll use is pretty standard for most recipes.

Creating inline links

One of the nicest things about the wiki environment is the ease of interlinking of entries. There's no need to use long URL strings for every little link you want. Just like almost everything else you've seen so far, you can create a link by using square brackets around a word. In addition, by adding a pipe (|) we can specify what word will be linked much as we can with a [url] tag in vbcode.

As mentioned above, linking categories takes one extra simple step. A leading colon is needed to keep them from automatically becoming a topic category. For Example:

[[Mashed Potatoes]] leads to a specific recipe, while [[:category:Potato]] leads to a category... 
Personally if I'm talking about the [[:category:Potato|Potato]] category, I prefer to write it like so.

Gives us: Mashed Potatoes leads to a specific recipe, while category:Potato leads to a category... Personally if I'm talking about the Potato category, I prefer to write it like so.

Editing the Core of Your Recipe

This is where it all starts. Yes, I said starts. All the categorizing and formatting stuff was more a technicality than anything. At this point we are going to begin entering in all the juicy details of your recipe as well as the instructional photos.

Introduction

Most people tend to have an introduction paragraph of some sort at the beginning of their recipe. This lets you introduce the recipe itself, maybe tell a story of where you learned it. Including a basic description of the food and its taste and style wouldn't hurt either, as it helps people browsing recipes decide if it's something they could eat or not. Sometimes pictures of the food doesn't tell much about the food other than its appearance. What it may not say is that it burns like one of the lower layers of hell, for example. People have different food preferences so the descriptions help them decide if your recipe is right for them.

Ingredients

The first thing most people want to see with any recipe is what's in it, so using the bulleting method from above (Using * at the beginning of a line), you'll want to list the ingredients one by one and the amount of each that will be needed. It's not a bad idea to make the ingredients their own section as well (using the technique from above with the = sign). You can see it done where it says "Ingredients".

• 1/2 cup Ingredient one
• 1/4 Tablespoon Ingredient 2
• 2 pieces of Meat 1
• 1/3 Teaspoon water

... and so on. Make sure to list all of your ingredients here.

Adding Recipe Instructions

In this section we will go over entering the steps involved in making your recipe. For the most part, this section is very straightforward. The hardest part of it is the task of inserting images into the recipe.

• List the first step of your recipe like this with a bullet.
• List the second step of your recipe. If this step requires an associated picture with it to show what you are doing we can add it underneath.

Adding a Photo

A few ground rules with photos you upload:

• Please try to keep the size of the images to under 80kb
• Please try to make the images an appropriate size; they don't need to be 1600x1200. A standard size here is 640x480 for all instructional images and maybe an 800x600 image for the final product.
• Label the images appropriately. If you are making a recipe for devil's food cake, devil01, devil02 or devilmix, devilbatter are far more appropriate than just 01, 02, 03 or image1, image2.

If you look to your left at the bottom of the menu you should see a link called "Upload File" in the toolbox menu. In case you don't, it looks like this:

Clicking this will bring you to the upload screen which should look like this:

As you can see, we have an area to enter the location of the image you want to use. Below that is an area that shows the destination filename that will be on the Wiki's server. Remember that by default it capitalizes the first letter of the filename even if it was lowercase on your computer. Filenames on the Wiki are case sensitive.

The last step of this process is to insert the image into your recipe. Underneath the bulleted text describing the step illustrated in the photo, you want to insert your image with the following code:

[[image:ImageFilename.jpg]]

These are the main components of adding a recipe to the Goons with Spoons wiki. Now we will do a short example recipe showing both code and how it looks when saved. This hopefully will aid in visualizing how the final result will look as you type it up.

Example Recipe

This is how it will look when saved

This is my recipe for Delicious Meal. It was designed by my mom. She learned it from the vikings. It's a very sweet meal with a slight tangy taste to it.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup water
• 2 Yak legs
• 1/3 Teaspoon salt

Method

• Boil Water and slowly stir in 1/3 Teaspoon salt
• Place Yak Legs into boiling water and slowly check if the meat is becoming tender.

• Place on a plate and serve.

This is how the code appears

Posting a Recipe on the SA forums and the GWS Wiki

Easily transferring from a forums thread

Most the time we don't put our recipes straight onto the wiki, but post them on the Something Awful Forums for everyone to see. In this case it can be a pain to move them to the wiki, but there are a few tricks that can make it go quickly and smoothly. Word, Works, Open Office, or even notepad/wordpad are all your friends.

The first task is going to be to remove all the vbcode from your SA post. Copy the whole post into one of the word processing programs I listed. I'm using Word's replace function for this tutorial. In most programs it will be under edit then replace. In Word 2007 it's on the far right.

When the replace window opens up you're going to search for all image tags, so in the find area type [img] and in the replace area type [[image:

After that you need to remove the closing tags, so in the find area type [/img] and in replace type ]].

This will remove all the image vbcode from your SA post. If you used anything like bold or italics, you will need to remove and replace those as well. You should be able to easily accomplish this using the same method as above.

The most time consuming part of the migration process from forums to Wiki is uploading images. Just be sure to keep the images you've uploaded to your image host (WaffleImages or something similar) and re-upload them here as outlined in the "Adding a Photo" section above.

If you didn't save the images, open up your thread on Something Awful and right-click and save as every picture in your post into one folder, then upload them to the Wiki as necessary. Again, please try to keep your pictures at a maximum resolution of 640x480 and under 80kb.

If for some reason the images aren't appearing, check to make sure your code was replaced correctly and that it is in the format

[[image:image.jpg]]

If the format is correct, check the filename. Remember, filenames are case sensitive.

Writing an entry easily uploaded to both sites

The method I use (Toast) is to write my recipes out for the wiki first. Sometimes I do this directly on the wiki, sometimes I do it in Word. Be careful in programs such as Word though, as sometimes there are apostrophe issues and other other minor character glitches.

Most of the formatting code for the Wiki doesn't look horrible on a forum post if I'm in a hurry, otherwise I can use the find replace method outlined above to replace my

 ==, '' '' 

and the like with vb formating.

For images, start by naming them something intelligent and placing them in a folder by themselves so that you can easily upload them first to the Wiki then to whatever hosting you're using for the SA forums.

In short, if you plan for it from the start, posting on both sites is easy and quick. This lets people comment and enjoy your recipes in the short term on the forums then go back and find them quick 3 months or 3 years later.

Other (Optional) Things

• The handy table of contents that you see at the top of the page only appears if you have more than three sections marked with ==. If you want to force the Table of Contents to appear (I usually do, especially for recipes with lots of pictures)simply enter __FORCETOC__ (that's two underscores on either side).

• To remove the [edit] boxes next to each section, you can enter __NOEDITSECTION__ again with two underscores on either side.