MisesWiki:Handout for students
Mises Wiki is an online encyclopedia devoted to covering political and economic topics from an Austrian school point of view. The editors of Mises Wiki encourage you to submit your class essays and papers to this site as new articles, or as expansions to existing coverage of related topics.
Contents
Benefits
By submitting your content, you make it available for others to read and learn from. You may receive valuable feedback that will help you become a better writer and provide insights into a subject you were interested enough in to choose as the topic for your essay or paper. You may even form connections in the Austrian school community that will be useful in your career as an economist, academic, business professional, etc.
Submitting your content in the proper format will require you to learn at least the fundamentals of wikicode. This knowledge can be helpful, for example, if you find yourself needing to submit content to a corporate intranet wiki in your professional life. Mises Wiki uses MediaWiki, a popular and powerful wiki software package. The same wikicode format you would use on Mises Wiki would also be what you would encounter on other MediaWiki installations, including the world's largest wiki, Wikipedia.
Adapting your work to wikicode
If you plan on eventually submitting your work to Mises Wiki (or another wiki), you can save time by writing it in wikicode from the beginning, submitting it to the wiki, and then printing it out to hand in. But if you have papers currently in a word processor format, you can convert it to wikicode fairly easily. In learning to do this, it may be very helpful to go to an existing, well-formatted article such as the article on Ludwig von Mises, click on the Edit tab to see the wikicode, and then refer to that format as an example.
First create an account at Mises Wiki. Then, if you wish to experiment with wikicode without exposing it to editing by other users, create a new page in your userspace (e.g. User:YourUserName/Title of Your Paper). You can copy and past your article into that page, and then convert the content into wikicode. Wikicode is designed to be closer to plain text than raw HTML, so this process should be relatively simple.
As you proceed, you can click "Show preview" from time to time to see how the parser will make your work look once you save it. You can also save intermediate versions to the wiki, for example if you need to shut down your computer or if you want to reduce the possibility of accidental loss of your work. When your saved article looks acceptable, you can click on the "Move" tab (it's one of the hidden tabs accessible by clicking the down arrow to the right of "View history") and move the page into mainspace.
Converting references
MisesWiki articles have a references section for endnotes. In wikicode, this section only contains a one-line template transclusion telling the wiki to display there all the references that were cited inline. Therefore, all you need to do is go to the places in your paper that have footnotes, and convert them to a format that includes a citation template within <ref> and </ref> tags. For example:
<ref>{{cite book|title=Liberalism|url=http://mises.org/liberal/ch1sec8.asp|author=von Mises, Ludwig
|chapter=Democracy|date=1985|publisher=Foundation for Economic Freedom}}</ref>
There are a variety of citation templates you can use, depending on the nature of the citation (e.g. journal, news article, book, etc.)
Converting section headings
Section headings on wikis are created using equal signs, e.g.:
==Advantages of capitalism==
Adding wikilinks
It is helpful to add wikilinks. Also called "internal links," these link to other articles on the wiki. Simply put double-brackets around any text that you want to have link to a wiki article by the same name. Or you can have text different from the article title link to that article, e.g.:
[[democracy|democratic systems]]
Seeking help
If you save drafts of an article that you are having difficulty converting to wikicode, other editors may notice and offer help on their own initiative; or you may ask for help, for example by posting a message at the Commons.
