Instructions for editors

Title

Please put a useful title at the top of each page that describes its contents.
Use following "title" formatting to get the same style as on this page (surrounded by thin lines below and above the text):

-=Title of Page=-

Break the text into sections and use table of contents.

If the contents are longer than one screen, use the table of contents feature.
A table of contents lists the headings within the page:

{maketoc}

Headings are indicated by exclamation marks (!!!...) at the start of the line. One exclamation mark (!) indicates the top level heading (displayed as underlined blue upper-cased letter) and two marks (!!) indicates the second level heading (as italicized black letter).

! Top-level section header
!! Second-level section header
!!! Third-level section header

You can also force the wiki to split a logical page into separate pages (as has been done for the Metadata Guidelines contents page) using:

...page...

Referring to files

Please do not attach files to the wiki pages for the metadata guide. Maintaining links to files attached to a page is very difficult. Instead, put the files in the Metadata Guidelines file gallery. Do not set any categories for the files - if you do it may make the files invisible to anyone else. When you upload the file you will be asked for a name to be shown against it in listings. Please use a name with the structure <NameOfPage>_<CamelCaseDescription> - that will sort the files associated with a page together. Once the file is uploaded, the file gallery will show an id. You can link to the file using

http://wis.wmo.int/file=<fileID>.

Using the gallery means that we can replace the file without having to change all the links.

Code snippets

When it is necessary to show a few lines of XML or other computer-processed code fragment, it is suggested to use "{CODE}" block to indicate the boundary.

{СODE(caption="input")}
<gmd:MD_Metadata xmlns:gmd="...">
{СODE}

<gmd:MD_Metadata xmlns:gmd="...">

Out of the CODE block, you will find problems with the wiki parsing your content. In particular, the angle brackets (< and >) have to be written as ~lt~ and ~gt~ (note - this example is a bit tricky, since ~lt~ and ~gt~ are parsed before ~number~ so there is no escape). The sign ~ itself is entered into the wiki as ~126~.

Giving big picture

Too much amount of example is not nice for readers. In that case it is recommended to give "big picture" of the metadadata (or fragment). There are several ways:

• HTML Table (as shown in the page MDG_Manual)
• HTML Itemize