Contributing

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 bar. When you've decided on what you want to name your recipe as type it into the search bar 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 bar 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 you will be taken to the main editing window. This is where all the information for your entire recipes page is saved, stored, and edited. All content needs to be entered into this window. To make sure you are in the right place, the window should look just like this:

Hopefully this is the page you see. If you don't go back one step and make sure you did indeed click "Create this page". 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 it will belong too. Categories in the edit window are entered in the form of [ [category:Categories Name] ] minus the spaces. There are many categories and you will most like want to sort your recipe by more than one. Some categories to sort by are: Author Name, Main Ingredients, Food Type, Meal Type, and by Cuisine Type.

So for example I could sort my recipe by my name (Jpfan01), then by cuisine type (Thai), then by the ingredient (Chicken), and finally the food type (Noodle). As an example here is the category sorting I did 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 which is also pictured. Simply replace my name with yours.

Please be conservative when creating brand new categories. Like we don't need a "breaded chicken" and "chicken" category both in the ingredient section. If it is something no one else has used though and it is key to the recipe feel free to make a new category, just make sure it's need. 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 into your entry for "Celery".

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 have a core meat component then a seperate sauce component for instance. For that we can create seperate sections to divide the recipe up. Even nicer is that at the top of the page there will be a nice contents chapter 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 board. 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 three buttons with a bold B and and italicized I and an Ab that are underlined 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.
[[Underlined Text Goes Here]] for underlined text it's double brackets on each side.

Be cautious with underlining though as underlining in wiki links to internal wiki topics that may or may not have anything entered for them.

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

• List Item 1
• List Item 2

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 and tends to work best for them.

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. It helps people browsing recipes decide if it's something they could eat or not. Sometimes pictures of the food don't tell much about the food besides it looks good. 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.