How-to-Contribute
Welcome to the HPCWiki! If you are looking at this page the chances are good that you are considering to contribute to this wiki. This page gives a general overview on how to contribute to the wiki, including login, editing and other tips and best practices. If you are looking for information on how to write a page itself, e.g. how to insert a picture or a code snippet, please either refer to Wiki Syntax or view the source code of this Sample Page or any other page in the wiki.
Login
In order to edit or create any wiki page you will first have to log in via the link in the top right corner. The login is handled by Shibboleth, meaning you can log in with the login data from your home university (provided this university is authenticated to eduGAIN). If there are any problems with the login, please write an email to the administrators.
Editing
MediaWiki is a Software with build-in Version control. Therefore the usage of "commenting out" functionality is strongly discouraged for this task!! It makes comparing of different article versions significantly harder. Futhermore keeping old versions of the article in the source code is detracting others from editing the article.
Editing vs Discussion
All changes to the wiki are reviewed. This especially means that you should feel free to fix mistakes or typing errors instantly. Improvements are always welcome in order to increase the quality of the wiki! If you are unsure about a certain piece of information, you can also start a discussion. Note that renaming a page may not be a minor edit because the quality of a title might be controversial. If you still want to rename a page, make sure to use the 'move' feature and fix double redirects because they are not followed automatically. If you think there is something missing feel free to create a new page. As this is supposed to be a widely shared wiki, more contributions are always welcome, especially as every institute or university has their own focus and specialities.
Wiki Structure
This wiki is structured in two dimensions and we would appreciate your edit to fit into this scheme
site specifics vs site-indepent concepts
Aiming to be a documentation for all HPC centers, the HPC Wiki has to carefully divide information into site-specifics and site-independent concepts. Any site-specific content should be in the section "site-specifics" on the left hand side and might be external references to the HPC center's own local documentation. However, all other articles should be site-independent. This means that any site-specific information should be removed from the text and instead linked to the respective "site-specifics" like e.g. Nodes. If there is an overview page missing, feel free to create one and get in touch to have it inserted into the menu. If you go to local documentation of the different HPC centers, you might not be able to Login and/or edit there.
Target Orientation
An important goal of this wiki is to support different levels of knowledge in HPC. Therefore, pages are divided into different categories: Basics, Site-specific, HPC-User, HPC-Dev, HPC-Admin, Optimization_tips, FAQ and Tools. It is currently not possible for everyone to edit the menu on the left with the various categories. New pages will be reviewed and inserted into their respective category. If you feel like your page was sorted wrongly or misunderstood you can start a discussion as mentioned above. But even if you cannot place your page yourself you should consider carefully where you would place it and write it accordingly. For example, a page which is intended for HPC-Dev is aimed at more or less experienced HPC programmers and should not need an explanation on how to open a Shell. However, if you find that your page requires basics that cannot yet be found in the HPC-User or Basics section please feel free to add it there as a separate page. Keep in mind that those sections are targeted at users who are yet unfamiliar with HPC. Remember to include links to prerequisites or related pages.
Pictures
Guidance how to upload pictures can be found in the Wiki Syntax.
Further Tips
Many features for editing are listed under Tools. One useful tool is 'What links here' which shows a list of all pages which have a link to the page you visited when clicking on the tool. This can be used to fix double redirects. Other useful pages can be found under 'Special pages' in the Tools section, e.g. a page listing all pages, a page listing all files, etc. It may also be helpful to simply browse through the wiki and check the source code of the other pages.