Austrian Economics Wiki: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.

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. Perhaps the easiest way to learn to do this is to go to an existing, well-formatted article such as miseswiki:democracy, click on the Edit tab to see the wikicode, and then refer to that style.

First create an account at Mises Wiki. You may wish to begin by creating a new page in your userspace (e.g. User:YourUserName/Title of Your Paper. You can begin by copying and pasting 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.

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 community portal.