How to contribute

CowleyRoad.org is a DIY community history - help us write it!

How it works

This website functions like a local Wikipedia. You are invited to make an account so that you can add your memories, images and research about Cowley Road buildings.

Making an account

On the top right of any page, click 'Request Account'. On the form, say a bit about yourself and what your interest is in Cowley Road in the 'Notes' field (to help us filter out spammers).

You will receive an automated email inviting you to login with a temporary password. Check your spam folder if you can't see it. Then come back to this wiki and use the Login link in the top right of any page.

Editing a page

Navigate to the building you are interested in, either on the homepage at CowleyRoad.org, by browsing through this wiki, or typing the address directly into the URL. Eg, this is the page for number 250 Cowley Road:

http://www.cowleyroad.org/wiki/index.php?title=250

Once on the page, click the 'Edit' tab in the top right. Wait for a few moments, and you will see an editing page which looks a bit like a Word document. (If you're a bit geeky and prefer to use Wiki markup, you can choose to switch to the Wikitext editor.)

Add your changes, then click 'Save Page' at the bottom. Adding a Summary is optional - for example, "Added photo from 1976" or "corrected spelling".

 

Adding images

1. Go to the File Upload page to upload one image, or go to the Upload Wizard if you have several images to upload.
2. You will be invited to name the image. Please include the street number, and the date if possible, in the image filename. If it's an external image of the building to be featured on the main 'streetview', then it's important that images are named in this format: streetNumber-year-month-day.fileformat. For example, an image of the Excelsior cafe in 1972 (address: 250 Cowley Road) should be named: 250-1972.png
3. In the description, give the name of the copyright holder (the person who took the image), and specify what license it is to be published under. See the Copyright page to understand the options.
4. Finally, insert the image into the relevant page. For example, to put the Excelsior cafe image into the page for 250 Cowley Road, go to https://www.cowleyroad.org/wiki/index.php?title=250

Once you are on the right page, click Edit tab, switch to Wikitext editor, then add the file using this format:

[[File:mypicture.png|frame| Caption text]]

For the Excelsior image, this would mean you type:

[[File:250-1972.png|frame| This image shows the Excelsior cafe in its heyday in 1972]]

Save your changes, and the image should now appear in a frame to the right of the page, with a caption. Lovely!

Assigning images to pages

There are usually some images on the wiki which have been uploaded, but not yet used on a page, so they are unlikely to be seen by people browsing the website. A good job for wiki volunteers is to regularly check the list of unused files and either insert them into a page (instructions above), or if they are a duplicate, to delete them.

Understanding copyright

CowleyRoad.org is an open access archive, and our vision is to create a 'free culture' collection of material which is freely available for community use and re-use. Therefore, we encourage you to add material for which you are the copyright holder, so that the community can freely access your images and recollections in future.

When you take a photo or write some text, you are automatically the copyright holder. You do not need to register the work or otherwise indicate copyright; you get it automatically. Copyright means that nobody else can make copies of that work (including sharing it online, or showing it in a presentation, or re-using it in a project), unless you give explicit permission. Copyright in most cases lasts for your whole life and then 70 years after your death. This poses a problem if you want your work to be shared and viewed by others.

If you want your work to be shareable, you need to state explicitly that you are happy with this, by applying a special copyright license. This project uses Creative Commons licenses. When you upload images, you will be invited to choose which Creative Commons license you want to release your work under.

Be sure to see the Copyright page to understand what these licenses mean.

You are not permitted to upload anything to this website for which you are not the copyright holder. The only exception is for open licensed work where you understand and are in compliance with the copyright license, OR for old images where the copyright has definitely expired. In this case, you should use the 'CC0 public domain' license when uploading, because you will not be the copyright holder.

Editing guidelines

In order to make the website clear and user-friendly, please refer to these Editing Guidelines.

If you are using Wiki Markup

If you do not know what Wiki Markup is, you can happily ignore this section. If you prefer to use Wikitext instead of the standard edit interface, you will be using Wiki Markup which means that you will see some extra characters in amongst the text when you edit it. This consists of normal characters like asterisks, apostrophes or equal signs which have a special function in the wiki, sometimes depending on their position. For example, to format a word in italic, you include it in two pairs of apostrophes like ''this''

See this guide to wiki markup for more detail.