Help:Editing Introduction

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About editing OOModels[edit]

The OOModels wiki is a mediawiki as is used by the popular Wikipedia. In general, editing works the same. A brief introduction to the basic formatting syntax is given here. If you want to try it without doing harm, do so in the sandbox.

There are some important peculiarities to point out:

  • First, the overall structure of the OOModels wiki, which is explained here.
    It is very important to understand why it is crucial to obey to this structure: the wiki is not only used by humans, but by machines, too.
    What do these machines do? Well, OOModels as a resource of modelling artefacts provides these resources to automated application provisioning engines (Code Generators, Model Interpreters etc.). Furthermore, Format Converters are able to read artefacts from the wiki in one format and provide it in another format, for your convenience. Since machines are a bit fussy sometimes with syntax, we have to stick to that syntax to collaborate with them.
  • Second, the extensive use of subpages to provide namespaces for artefacts.
    These namespaces are organised according to the Java Package naming convention, i.e. they are written as the reverse order of some domain name you own or can control. E.g., if you own the domain my.domain.com, you would use a namespace of com/domain/my. This guarantees global uniqueness.
    Currently, basically all pages in the wiki are open for arbitrary editors, while it is expected that you respect other people's thoughts and efforts in a polite manner. That means: do not substantially change artefacts in namespaces that are not your own without explicit permission of the owner. You are of course very welcome to add comments, documentation, correct minor errors or add links like "here's my totally better/smarter/faster/cooler implementation".
    If it turns out this open approach will not work, it might be unavoidable to restrict editing permissions to people who can prove they are the owner of the domain or something like that.
  • And finally, artefact source code contained in pages is formatted in a well defined way.
    This guarantees that the code is both readable by humans and machines and can be edited easily.