sona pona:Guide
Welcome, aspiring editor! This work-in-progress guide will hopefully help you get your bearings on the wiki.
What do I do here?
- even just fix typos
- sources
- formatting
- media
- make requested pages or ones you know about
- write essays
Technical
Moderation
Your first edit won't appear immediately and will instead be sent to the moderators for approval. This is to prevent trolls from making new accounts purely to grief the wiki.[a]
Policy
Be bold
If you have an idea for an edit or page, but you're not sure whether others will like it, just do it! Everyone can easily bring a page back to a previous version, so it's impossible to permanently "ruin" anything. Patrolling ensures that every edit will be inspected by at least one other person.
Be messy
An unfinished or messy page is infinitely better than no page at all. Even if you never come back to it, someone else surely will.[b] Slap a {{Needs work}} template on top and let others work their magic.
Source what you can
Unlike topics covered by Wikipedia, there aren't many public reliable sources for Toki Pona. (In fact, this very wiki was made to fill that gap!) As such, it's fine if an article doesn't have any citations, though they're always appreciated. Potential resources include:
- pu and ku, if you have them
- freely-available fragments, such as the pu dictionary or "Notes on lipu pu"
- other materials by jan Sonja, e.g. the tokiponization guidelines
- lipu Linku
- anything on the Recommended learning resources page
- the Toki Pona census
When using a proficient speaker's thoughts as a source, remember to note whether they reflect consensus or are rather their personal nasin. This includes what you may consider "official" material:
This is the way I use Toki Pona.
—pu, p. 7
Resources with open submissions, such as Tatoeba and Glosbe, often attract overconfident beginners and so should be treated with care.
Trans rights
Formatting
In addition to standard MediaWiki formatting, note the following.
Italics
Mark emphasized text with <em>emphasized text</em>.
Mark Toki Pona text with Template:tp. For other languages, see the next section.
{{tp|mu}} outputs mu.Mark variables with <var>variable name</var>.
For other uses, like the titles of longform works, you can use ''italic text''.
Language
Mark the language of non-English text with Template:lang.
{{lang|fr|''je parle bien''}} outputs je parle bien. Hover to see the language name.Mark unitalicized Toki Pona text with Template:tok.
{{tok|mu}} outputs mu.Titles
Mark a page title as italic or Toki Pona text using Template:Italic title, Template:tp title, or Template:tok title according to the guidance above.
sitelen pona
Display sitelen Lasina or UCSUR codepoints as sitelen pona with Template:sp.
{{sp|mu}} outputs mu. Hover or press to see the sitelen Lasina input.Indentation
Indent with Template:Indent.
: (description detail) syntax without a preceding ; (description term) produces invalid HTML, which is not accessible.Citations
Most sources will probably be cited with Template:cite web. There are also specialized templates like Template:cite pu, Template:cite ku, Template:cite YouTube, Template:cite Discord, and Template:cite lipamanka (for lipamanka's semantic space dictionary).
Please consider archiving a source with the Wayback Machine or archive.is. This is especially necessary for Discord uploads; unarchived links will start to expire so that the files can only be accessed through Discord.