Urantiapedia is a collaborative website based on Wiki.js with the purpose of being a unified center for the dissemination of all knowledge regarding The Urantia Book.
Blue Fields is a website that has been created to join and organize readers of The Urantia Book who wish to collaborate in smart, purposeful and altruistic projects all over the world. It is the website that manages register and collaboration between volunteers of Urantiapedia.
Urantiapedia has two public projects in GitHub: Urantiapedia and Urantiapedia-backup created to serve as a quick start-up procedure for initial content. It contains files in certain formats and software that help automate the creation of initial content.
This manual is for users called “Assistant Editors”, or users that comply with these requirements:
“Assistant Editors” can collaborate in two ways at their convenience.
Either method is equally acceptable. The difference between one or another form of collaboration is detailed in this table:
| Mode | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| By email | Can work without network Contents are created faster Support files can be edited (folder /input) |
The editor does not appear as the creator of the changes on the web |
| On the web | The use of visual editors makes editing easier The editor appears as the creator of the changes |
Requires network access Saving is slower and you can only go page by page You can only edit things that are web pages |
Below we detail how the necessary actions would be carried out in both forms of collaboration.
GitHub is a webpage for creating collaborative projects, usually about software development. The project files for Urantiapedia are here: Urantiapedia.
This project is public. Anybody can download the files. You have two options:
To download everything go to main page of the project in GitHub and in the green button that says Code, click and select the option Download ZIP. The browser will start downloading a ZIP file with the most updated content. Save it in any folder or check your Downloads folder to locate the file.
Be aware that it can be a long download because the project contains a good amount of files. You should have at least 2-3 GB of free space in your computer.
Once download has ended you will have a file called urantiapedia-master.zip. This is a compressed file so please uncompress it in any folder. If you don’t know how to uncompress a ZIP file it is very easy. In Windows, for example, right click with the mouse in the file and select Extract all to open the uncompressing tool.
Once the files are uncompressed you are ready to go to next step with Text Editor.
In the case that you don’t want to download all the project, you can do this.
Go to this URL in the browser: https://github.com/JanHerca/urantiapedia/tree/master/
This is the path with the files. You can move through folders in GitHub page. When you need one file, right click with the mouse on the name of it and select Save link as. That will brings you the dialog to save each file.
This way you can choose which files you want to download, which is a better option if you do not have very much free space in your hard drive or you do not require the full project.
Now we can edit them in a Text Editor.
To edit the files we can use any tool that can edit text files. However, it is highly recommended to use software that can show hidden characters and white space. It is important to show them because this extra chars are used to create the structure of files and if we remove them we can corrupt files.
The most recommended software is Visual Studio Code, but others can make the job:
All of them are free to use.
If you are going to use Visual Studio Code the steps to setup it are these:
To know the content of the GitHub project and its structure, check Content of GitHub project.
Collaboration through GitHub has the advantage that anything can be done easily through the GitHub web. But to make Assistant Editors work really simple, they can send the files edited by sending them in an email to any of the maintainers in the project or to urantiapedia@gmail.com.
If you have been in contact with any of the administrators of the project, you can send them directly your work. Then it is really easy for maintainers to update the Urantiapedia GitHub website with the new content, and through it, to update Urantiapedia site. You will be notified when the changes are made in the web, that usually takes no more than an hour, to check that your changes have been updated correctly.
Remember that if you send your work by mail it will not be reflected that uploaded changes were made by you, and instead they will appear as changes by Administrators. If you want to be tagged as creator of the changes, you must use the functionality of this website.
In this case, all tasks are carried out through this website. You need to log in with the editing account provided, and follow the manuals on how to make edits:
To know about the milestones of the project check Milestones of Urantiapedia. The tasks that can be carried out by the “Assistant Editors” are those indicated here:
Currently tasks 1 and 3 have been completed.