About the Trivia Column

First of all, in case you have somehow reached this page without having noticed the Trivia Column, it is here: http://indics.info/index.php/trivia. A random trivia article is also displayed on the generic pages of the site (e.g. the front page) under the heading "Did you know...", in the left-hand column. There you can click Quick Answer to display a brief answer right on the spot, or choose Details to read the full article.

The listing page

At the top of the trivia list page, you'll see links to the three root categories of the picture gallery: Topic and Location. These allow you to browse trivia in a systematic way, grouped into various topics such as Architecture, Cuisine, Nature, etc; or by geographic location within India. A number displayed next to the category name tells you how many trivia items you'll find in that category. Note that most of the categories have subcategories or children, and the number of items in those are presently not included in this count - so it may well be worth clicking an apparently empty category to find its child categories brimming with interesting tidbits.

To return to the trivia listing page, you'll also see a box titled Options. This lets you go to the Article Map, which at present is more like a dump than a map: it lists all articles on the site, grouped by article type and by category within each type. It's good for an overview of what you can find on the site, but not for much else - this may change in the future. Your second Option is to visit the Archive page, where you can look for articles - not only trivia - by publication date and by category.

Further down the page you'll find a self-explanatory pager, and options to sort trivia by publication date, alphabetically by title, number of times they have been viewed, and by rating.

This is followed by the actual article list at last. You can click either the article title or the More... link to go to the page with the full details on an item. Or you can just click Quick Answer to reveal a brief answer right there. Below the title you'll see a number of maroon headwords in square brackets. These are links to categories, which let you browse other trivia in any of the categories to which this article is assigned. An easy way to find similar trivia. There's also a sand-coloured box on the right side, which contains keywords for the article. Clicking one of these will take you to a list of all articles that share that keyword, giving you another way to look for related items.

The display page

The display page of a trivia article contains an additional paragraph or two, telling you more about the question and the answer.

The categories list on the list page is replaced by category crumbtrails at the top of the display page - click any of the category names to see more trivia in that niche. The keywords box is next to the body of the article. Below the text you'll see <prev and next> links to read more trivia without returning to the list page (previous and next in the order they were published on the site).

If you are a registered user and are logged in, you can rate each article (once only), giving it 0 to 5 stars. Registered users can also add comments to each article. It is recommended that you post generic queries in the Forum rather than in article comments, which should be reserved for discussion of the article at hand.

Submitting trivia to the site

If you are a registered member of IndiCS.InfO and are logged in at the moment, you'll see a Submit Now command in the articles menu (top left-hand side of the page) while you are browsing trivia, as well as a Contribute option in the Options box on the listing page. This will take you to a fairly straightforward form that you'll need to fill out to submit an article.

See the Help Page for Submissions (coming soon) for general instructions, tips and help. Please fill out the Source box in the form, providing a web link where your trivia article can be verified, or naming a book and author where the information comes from. Note that you must not submit material that is copyrighted unless you are the copyright owner and are willing to relinquish your rights to IndiCS.InfO. See Terms of Service for details.

You can click Save and Edit at the bottom of the form to see how your submission will look on the site, and continue editing. However, once you press Create Article, you will no longer be able to see or edit your work. This means you cannot resume editing at a later stage; I suggest that you write the text of your article offline and not do all the writing and editing on the site form. Submitted articles will need admin approval (which will usually be granted but may be refused without explanation) before they are published for all to see.