प्रबन्धकगणेभ्यः मार्गदर्शनम्

As per recent correspondence, Google is planning to introduce some radical changes on their Google Sites platform towards the second half of this year, which would significantly affect our work, as one of them would prevent us from creating and editing tables.

Thus, we have been searching for an alternate platform and came across a wiki farm called ‘miraheze’, which would let us create and manage our own set of wiki pages. This platform uses the MediaWiki engine, which is the same one as used by Wikipedia, so maybe some of you would be familiar with the appearance and layout.

This document tries to explain how to use the Visual Editor and some other administrative features on miraheze, which might seem a little different at first compared to what we are currently using, but once we become more familiar, using it should also become relatively easy. Please try using it and making some edits on your own, and reach out to your peers as well as administrators/other members in the group, if you require any assistance.

Creating a new account on miraheze and logging in
Since we would like to prevent unauthorized access to the editing tools by external viewers, we have restricted the same only to registered users having an e-mail account, and also allow only our administrators to create new accounts.

Thus, please reach out to an administrator with your desired username, and also provide them an e-mail address if possible. You will get an e-mail once your account is created and then you can log in using the following URL:

https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin

The login page looks like this: A couple of important things to know before logging in for the first time:

- Your miraheze username, unlike most platforms,  is case-sensitive . So, please use the exact same username that you see in the e-mail that you get,  including spaces and capital letters . If you miss any character or make a mistake, you will get an error message saying "invalid username".

- Errors have been reported on browsers other than Edge. So, using Edge browser is highly recommended, but it shouldn't be necessary.

In order to reduce unauthorized login attempts, we have removed all links to the login page and other special pages from the main page. Thus, please do not share the above URL with anyone except fellow administrators and teachers, if possible.

Admin links page
When an administrator logs in, they get access to certain additional features by clicking the 'Admin links ' page in the top right, as shown below: On clicking this link, you will be taken to a page which has the following options: In order to stay concise, this guide will explain only the options that site admins will be using on a daily basis and are relevant to our work at this point of time. Other options can be explored later if required.

Create account
Managing user accounts is one of the most important tasks of site admins, and creating new accounts is an integral part of the same.

In order to create a new user account, please obtain the  desired username  and  e-mail address  from the new user first.

Clicking on 'Create account ' under admin links will take you to a page that looks like this: Follow the steps shown above to create a new user account:

- Enter the username for the new user.

- Select the checkbox that says 'Use a temporary random password... '. This will remove some of the input fields that you need to fill in.

- Enter the e-mail address of the new user.

- Finally, click the blue 'Create account ' button.

The user will get an e-mail with a temporary password that they can use to log in, and will be prompted to change their password immediately after their first login.

User list
Clicking on 'User list ' under admin links will take you to a page that looks like this: On scrolling down, you can see that this is simply a list of all user accounts on the site along with the user groups that they are a part of. You can visit this page to check the user groups assigned to a user account, verify that an account exists, or to find out a particular username (using the search feature) at the top.

User rights
This is the most important page that admins will need to use for group assignment, and can be accessed by clicking on 'User rights ' under admin links. On entering the correct username and then clicking on the button on the right, the following section loads underneath:



Here, you can assign groups to / remove group membership for the user account entered, and then click on the button at the bottom to save the changes. You may enter a reason to keep track of the change if required. Group creation and management is beyond the scope of this guide and is therefore not included.

View all pages
Clicking on 'All pages ' under admin links takes you to a page that looks like this: On scrolling down, you can see that this is simply a list of all pages on the website, similar to the sitemap on the old Google Sites platform. This is a good place to search for pages whose link may not be found on the main page or elsewhere, and may also be helpful during clean-up activities.