स्वयम्सेवकगणेभ्यः 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 guide tries to explain how to use the Visual Editor 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 volunteers and teachers, if possible.

Editing pages

Once you open a specific page, you can click the ‘Edit’ link as seen in the below screenshot to open up the Visual Editor:

(Note: Before your first edit, you will need to verify your e-mail address to confirm your identity.)

Note: if you see an ‘Edit source’ button instead of just ‘Edit’, please click it, change “action=edit” at the end of the resulting URL to “veaction=edit” and press Enter. For example, the URL for the page shown in the above image would have to change from

https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/01_-_धातुगण-परिचयः?action=edit

to

https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/01_-_धातुगण-परिचयः?veaction=edit

The Visual Editor should then load properly.

When you try to edit a page for the very first time, you will see this message:

You can either click on the "user preferences" link shown above or go to https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/Special:Preferences to confirm your e-mail address.

When you get to the User Preferences page and scroll down, if you did not provide an e-mail address initially for account creation, you'll see this:

You can click the "Set an email address" button to set one up. You may still need to confirm it before you start editing.

If you did provide an e-mail address, you'll see something similar to this:

In this case, you can click the "Confirm your email address" button and then click the blue button that says "Mail a confirmation code" on the next page. You will be sent a link on the e-mail address you provided, and clicking it will confirm your e-mail address.

Once you have confirmed your e-mail address, you can start editing on miraheze.

Here's a link to the comprehensive usage guide for the Visual Editor: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor/User_guide

Please try and explore as many different features as you can, and reach out for help if you get stuck anywhere. Happy Editing!

Accessing page edit history

While we are in the process of migrating content over from the existing Google Sites platform, all of you are technically able to edit most of the pages on this new site. Thus, we request you to kindly refrain from editing any page except the ones you work on. If you happen to notice any changes to a page that you did not make, you can check the edit history by adding "?action=history" to the end of the URL.

An example URL is:

https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/01_-_धातुगण-परिचयः?action=history

You'll be taken to a page that will look similar to this:

Here, you'll be able to see all the changes made to the page along with the associated username. If you notice any changes made by another user on your page, please inform an admin immediately – they should be able to roll back the changes and restore the page to a previous state.