Students Step by Step Guide

This guide has been written to assist students whom are taking part in a formal student project within Physiopedia. The guide will help you with setting up your account, editing pages and problem solving.  

Please note that your tutor will be your first point of contact if you have any questions.

Project Instructions[edit | edit source]

Initially you will be given instructions from your tutor on the nature of your project in Physiopedia and what you will be expected to acheive.

These instructions will be outlined on a specific project page in Physiopedia which can be found listed somewhere on our main Projects page.

Find your project on the Projects page.

Get your own Physiopedia account[edit | edit source]

To make edits in Physiopedia you must have a Physiopedia account.  To do this follow the instructions below:

  1. Request an editing account by clicking on the this link.  
  2. You will be asked to complete a form where you must tell us:
    • your email address
    • your full name - as you will be adding to a professional resource this must be your full real name
    • a short biography - this will be included on your profile page, you can edit it later
    • your licence or registration details - please indicate that you are a student, which university you are from and which project you are working on
  3. Once you have submitted this form you will be sent an email which contains a link to confim your email address.
  4. Once you have confirmed your email address we will activate your account and you will receive your login details (username and password) by email. This process may take up to 48 hours.

If you do not receive this email within 24 hours there is a problem with your email (some university firewalls reject Physiopedia emails). First please check your spam folder to check that it hasn't been filtered into your spam.  If you still can't find it you should contact us

Now that you are able to login to Physiopedia we suggest that you complete you profile within Physiopedia.

Setting up your profile[edit | edit source]

Everyone with an account has a profile page in Physiopedia. See Profile page examples herehere and here.  These pages are easily found by Google so we suggest that you complete your profile to give yourself a professional presence on the site. Remember anyone can view this profile including future employers!

To complete your profile follow the instructions below:

  1. Go to your profile page.  This can be found by clicking on the link (Your Name) at the top of the left side bar under Personal Tools.
  2. You will see that the page contains the short biography that you provided at the top of the page with several empty sections further down the page.  You should make edits to the page under each section where appropriate so that you are represented online in an acurate and professional way. To do this:
    • Click the Edit tab at the top of the page (you must be logged in to see this).
    • In the editing box that appears make the changes and additions that you wish to make (you can move your short bio that was automatically added at the top of the page and include itunder the appropriate headings below).
    • Click Save to save your changes.
  3. We suggest that in the least you should add:
    • a photograph of yourself,
    • content under each of the headings where appropriate (you can add/amend headings as neccessary),
    • a link (such as a link to the university that you are studying at, the place where you work, the club where you volunteer etc).  

For editing assistance see our user tutorials on and editing pages, adding images and making links.

Once you have completed this you will begin to feel more comfortable with making edits in Physiopedia and are ready to move on to editing pages within the site.

Creating a new page[edit | edit source]

You may be tasked by your tutor to create a new page within Physiopedia.  If you are not tasked with creating new pages or yout tutor is doing this for you you can skip this section and move on to Editing Pages.  

There are a few things to consider when creating a new page in Physiopedia:

  1. Make sure that this page (or one very similar) does not already exist.  To do this:
    • Enter keywords from your new page title in the search box in the top right of this page. For example if you would like to create a page on "Low Back Pain in Pregnancy" you should search for "Back Pain", this will give you a list of all the articles on the site that have the term "Back Pain" in their title. Another example, if you would like to write a page on "Anterior Cruciate Ligament Rehabilitation" you should do a search for "Cruciate" and "ACL" to view all the existing pages that are already present on the site.
    • If the page that you wish to work on is already in existence we ask that you not create another page on the same topic but instead review and update the existing page.
    • If the page that you wish to work on is not in existence then you can go ahead and create your new page.
  2. To create your new page:
    • Enter the title of the new page in the text entry box in the top of the left side bar and click on the button Create New Article. You will be redirected to your new page where the editing box will be already open. Add some content to your new page and click Save, this will create you new page.
    • If your specific university project has a template for the pages that you are creating you might wish to add that template to your new page.  See the adding templates tutorial.
  3. Link to your new page.  Once you have created a new page within the site it is important to makes a link to it so that we can find it.  You will find a section at the bottom of your specific project page where there is a list of all the articles the you and your colleagues are working on.  You should add a link to your article here.  See the adding links tutorial.

Editing Pages[edit | edit source]

Once you have reached this stage (having passed through all the stages mentioned above) you should be feeling more comfortable with editing pages.  Things to note are that it is important that you add references correctly and you are likely to impress your assessors if you add images and video to your page, especially if you created them yourselves!  

Below are the tutorials that will help you with editing pages, the ones highlighted in bold will be most useful to you:

Help!![edit | edit source]

There will be times when editing Physiopedia when you need assistance.  When this time arises there are several things that you can do:

  1. Search the User Tutorials to see if they answer your questions.
  2. Search the FAQs to see if they answer your question.
  3. Search the Mediawiki help (this is the software that Physiopedia runs on, the same as Wikipedia) or search the Wikitext help (this is the code that Physiopedia is written in and can be accessed by the Wikitext button in the editing toolbar).
  4. If you still haven't found the answers to your questions contact your tutor for assistance.