Main:About Memento wiki

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About the Memento Database Wiki

The Memento Database Wiki

The Memento Database wiki (the Wiki) is a MediaWiki wiki (like Wikipedia) specifically by & for users of the Memento Database application. It is developed & supported by members of the Memento Database wiki team, which is referred to as WikiTeam and can be reached at WikiTeam@MementoDatabase.com. These team members are Memento Database users who have volunteered their time as committed to documenting the application for users and keeping it updated as the application continues to be updated by the developers. If you would like to volunteer your time in this way and have either experience editing wiki pages (again, like editing Wikipedia pages) or if you're interested in learning how to do that and then volunteering your time, please contact WikiTeam at the email address above. Your assistance is most welcome.

The goals of the Wiki are...

  • to provide documentation for all Memento features, including user interface features, scripting features, and any other features a user might consider using.
  • to augment the Memento Help facility with additional information as experienced by users.
  • to help potential users get started evaluating or using the application and adapting it to a new user's interests.
  • to provide helpful background information that users could learn to help them in their use of the application.

History of the Wiki

As of the time when the application was available only for Android devices and was at release 3.7 in 2016, the only documentation for the application was 2 documents provided by the developers: a FAQ and a Manual. At that time, both documents were incomplete & obsolete -- for instance, documenting only 9 of the then-current 14 field types.

So, a Memento user named Bill Crews offered to the developers to develop a wiki for the application, if the developers would provide an installation of the wiki server software that had been previously developed for the Wikipedia.com Web site. Upon their agreement to do so, Bill set about developing a wiki initially covering all field types available as of release 3.7 and then extending to its user interface (UI) components -- basically its screens & cards that users use.

As time went on, the wiki gained more & more coverage of information that might be useful to users, and the application grew to support more field types and other features. Features were added to support the scripting of various aspects of the use of the application in JavaScript, starting with JavaScript fields and then extending to actions, triggers, custom data sources, and so on, now to include Button fields. In addition, the developers began to offer the application on other platforms, called The Desktop Edition, which referred to Java implementations of the application for computer platforms running operating systems (OSes), including Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, and open source Linux. At that time, the Android application became referred to as The Mobile Edition. Moving years ahead, the developers established offices in Calgary, Canada where they created an additional Mobile Edition platform -- that of iOS, the OS from Apple that runs on iPhones & iPads. Over this time until 2021, Bill did his best to keep the wiki updated with these & all other updates to the application. He reached out several times via the Memento Forum for volunteers to help, but he received only 2 volunteers, each of which lasted only a little while, with no pages edited or created.

Then, as Bill retired professionally and moved into his 70s, he reached out again to the forum and was pleased to find Beth Dixon, who had good experience supporting applications and was interested in helping to expand and support the wiki. Together with another experienced & knowledgeable user named Ernst Moser, thus began WikiTeam. Ernst acts mostly as an advisor, as he is not very familiar with the English language, but his advice has been very helpful in our understanding of how Memento works and how the wiki might document it. While Bill has always been primarily a user of the Mobile Edition, Beth is primarily a user of the Desktop Edition and has begun to provide documentation in that area that had been missing. Most recently, she is providing YouTube videos for Memento users.

Then, in 2023, Alan Wehmann began to volunteer his assistance, which is greatly appreciated, and he is now part of the WikiTeam. His contributions are just about to be felt as this is written, and there will be more to come. Again, please consider volunteering yourself by contacting WikiTeam@MementoDatabase.com.

The structure of the wiki

The wiki begins with the Main Page, which begins with some introductory commentary. Then comes the Navigation Index, which contains links to all the various pages within the wiki. It is presented as a table with columns for Topics (also called Sections), Overviews (introductions to topics), Specs (specifications), & About (articles on various topics). Each row of the table is referred to as a Section, thus dividing the wiki into the introductory commentary, the navigation index, and some ending commentary on support topics and such.

Since there are many wiki pages, moving through the index requires some scrolling, so each page now has a banner menu as well to enable users who already know where they want to go to quickly access the areas of the wiki using links at the top of each page.