Get To Know The Place
Familiarize yourself with the menus and what typical pages are in each of those sections. Once you do that, you'll quickly see that the Wiki is pretty simple in its organization and you'll get a feel for what a good page is (in each section).

Register
Your fellow users can't give props to "Anonymous".

Set An Agenda
Make a To-Do if there is anything you think should be done but cannot do yourself (for whatever reason).

There Is No Sandbox
Please don't make arbitrary edits for the sake of getting familar with editing. These will be treated as spam, and anonymous users will be banned. Make your learning experience contribute to the pages. If you really want to get wild, do it on your own profile page.

Auto-Linking and Linking Tips

• If you're going to do linking, hit the "Suggest Links" tool first. It'll keep you from having to manually add links.
• Like Wikipedia, try to only link the same page once on a given page. Don't have ten links to Patrick in the same page; it's distracting.
  • In the shownotes, link consistently. That is, link to the show hosts pages in the hosts section of the article.
• Alternatively, to quickly add a link, begin to type in the name of the page, or use the "find page" tool and choose the page from the menu. This saves time and, NLO_Tristan thinks, will keep the link accurate in case the target page ever moves.
• Linking makes updating info on other pages easier. If every episode with a secret segment links to the secret segment page, the "links to this page" at the bottom of every page makes it easier for someone to complete the list of every episode of when a secret segment occurred.
  
• Link sensibly. Though we have a Live Show page on the Wiki, is linking to it appropriate because a page has the phrase "live show" in it? Maybe, maybe not -- depends on the context.. Consider the relevance of your links rather than throwing them in haphazardly.
  • Definitely okay links to include: segments, references, hosts/guests, episode names.

Tag Sensibly
Tags are great as they help users who search the site gets sets of pages with a given phrase. However, do not tag a page with all of its contents. Tags are for short phrases people might search for. At this point, it's not worthwhile tagging episodes with the names of recurring in-studio guests as they are now starting to have lists of episodes on their own pages.

Shownotes: Formatting and Show Ingredients

• The Formatting Cannon gives a clear idea of what an ideal shownotes page should look like. Follow the structure on that page as closely as possible. Consistency formatting and page-structuring helps users read the pages more quickly.
• When doing show ingredients, be brief and informative. Show ingredients are meant to be skimmed by a reader who is looking for where/when a particular topic/event occurred. The show notes should never be a worthy substitute for the NLO listening experience.
  • As a rule of thumb try to fit the ingredient one line. If the description can't fit on one line, then it's either a significant event which merits more detail elsewhere (perhaps as a memorable event), a verbose description which requires some editing, or an event which should be broken up into smaller parts.
  • Use a shorthand ("Segment: blah blah blah") if the ingredient is a recurring NLO item. For example, Voicemail: "Bring Nick Starr back" or BPOW: Cruising With Susan.
  • You don't have cover every single aspect of the program. Basically, show ingredients should cover topics and segments. "BPOW: Cruising With Susan" is good enough. You don't need to list every complaint Patrick makes about the show. If there is a call during the BPOW (or topic), note it and just say something like "BPOW continues."

Shownotes: Quotes
Quotes are great because (a) they are funny, (b) give readers a better impression of conversation content and (c) they might be useful to show producers. To get some quote inspirations look through episode threads to see what stuck out to other listeners.

Making A New Shownotes Page or Guest Page?
Use one of our templates! When creating the new page for the episode/guest, the page creation box pops up asking you for the page name, tags and templates. Choose, "Episode" or "Guest" from under the template options, generic text is inserted automatically. This will save you time with formatting, typing and organizing.

Show Dates
If you need the date of when a episode was released, look at the file name when you download it off of the main page.
Example: The file name for Episode 301 isNLO-301-05022008.mp3, meaning it was released on 5-2-2008.

Show Blurbs
If you need Patrick's original blurb for an episode, search the NLO forums or work through the previous entries on the main site: http://www.nobodylikesonions.com/?cat=3.

Use The Spellchecker
It's quick and painless, though it apparently doesn't get used enough.