Help:Add Building

Adding a new building to the wiki begins by clicking on the Add Building link on the left hand menu. That will bring up a form asking for the name for the new building's page. See the building naming section in the Style Guide for directions as to how to style the name.

After entering the name, a new form will be displayed listing the various fields associated with a building. Enter in as many of the fields as you have data, leaving the rest blank. Dates can have either the entire date or fragments of a date and can be flagged as approximate if necessary. Doing so ensures that "Abt:" prepends the date display on the final page.

At the top of the form, the image field anticipates an uploaded file. If you have an image to show on the wiki, click on the "Upload" button and a file selection window for your machine will open, allowing you to select a local file to upload. Once uploaded, the system will execute further processing on the file to ready it for display on the final pages.

The Geo-reference field deserves some additional explanation. There are actually three boxes on the form pertaining to this field: a box with "Enter address here" greyed out, with a button next to it labeled, "Calculate coordinates using address," a box below those two which initially is blank, and below that a box containing a map.

The goal of all three boxes is to enable you to determine the latitude and longitude of the building. Since there are few surveyors or astronomers contributing to the wiki, we've come up with a simple way to enter the correct values. There are three options:

• First, you could enter the address in the "Enter address box" again. (We know, you may already have entered the address further up the form, but, this entry will be used differently. Computers are stupid! Work with us here...) After entering in the address the map should update and place a red marker where it thinks that address is. If the map shows someplace in Kalamazoo(!), it means that the national database used to do these sorts of look-ups has another candidate matching that address, but somewhere else in the country. Go back to the address box and add the zip code or other local identifying element to what you had there already. The map should update accordingly.

• Second, if you have the lat/lon values already from another source, you could enter them right into the middle (initially blank) box. The map should update accordingly. Note that the form expects decimal degrees, which is not the same as degrees, minutes and seconds. Note the difference: 30.5 degrees (which is decimal notation) is the equivalent of 30°30’00” (degrees, minutes, seconds notation). Do not take something looking like 30°23’46” and enter it in as 30.2346. They are not equivalent and you'll find the map marker does not land where you intend. If you have degrees, minutes and seconds, use this conversion helper. Even though you enter decimal degrees here, the display on the actual finished page will be in degrees, minutes and seconds notation, which is the formal way to do that. (By the way, in case you were wondering, one second of longitude (East-West) in the Baltimore area equals about 80 feet on the ground. One second of latitude (North-South) around here equals about 101 feet.)

• Third, you could go right to the map, panning around and zooming in until you see the building. Clicking on it will compute the lat/lon and place it in the box above the map.

Look carefully where the map placed the marker. If it is not pointing right at the building, click directly on the building, and the marker should move to where you clicked. If the building does not exist anymore, you'll have to estimate where it was, and click there.

Voilà! The building's Geo-reference has been determined.

The architect and architectural firm fields assume that this building record will link to the architect or firm page you select here. If the page for them is already in the wiki, it will appear here as a dropdown selection. If it is not, enter the name here (using the naming convention in the Style Guide and hit <Enter> afterwards. Then continue entering data in the fields below.

When you have finished entering all the data, click on the "Save page" button at the bottom and you will be presented with the page you just created for the building.

Now you can use the Edit text link to add freeform text, images, citations, etc. to the page. Should you need to add or correct anything in the infobox, use the Edit Infobox link.