When you search Mahalo.com one of two things will happen...

A) You will land on an existing Mahalo search result page. That search result page will either be managed by a fellow Mahalo user, if not, you can choose to become the Page Manager for that search result. Just click the option to "Claim This Page" that appears in yellow across the top of the page and in a box down the left column. Once you've claimed the page, it's yours to manage and update.

Or B) Your search result has not been created by Mahalo, now you have the option to build the page from scratch. Continue on to learn more about how to build a Mahalo Page.

Mahalo wants to pay you for the effort you put into building new Mahalo pages. When you make a search on Mahalo and find that Mahalo does not yet have a Mahalo page on a particular topic, you can make a request to build that page.

You can choose the Mahalo Dollar amount in which we will pay you to initially build this page, Mahalo will generally accept amounts ranging from M$1 for non-popular terms, to M$3 for more popular terms and M$5-M$10 for some text-heavy terms. When you make the request a Mahalo staff member will accept or modify your request, a counter offer could be made if the dollar amount appears too high for the page. Mahalo may deny your request if the term requested can be re-directed to a term already on Mahalo. For example, a request to build "Facebook Game" would be denied as the term can be re-directed to "Facebook Games." - This helps us keep our search engine clean.

After you build the page you will become the page manager and will also earn a portion of the income the page produces in advertising.

Once your page request is accepted, Mahalo will contact you via email with a link to where you can write the guide note for your page. As of October 2009, Mahalo will create a Mahalo Task for your request, this allows Mahalo to pay you Mahalo Dollars for your work, and it allows Mahalo to quality control the page before it is built on Mahalo.

The top section of your Guide Note should be about 3 or 4 sentences. You should give a very general overview of the topic of the page, including "journalism"-style information: who, what, where, when and why. No plagiarism in this section or anywhere.

Avoid relying too much on your personal experience. Though this top section of the note can be very general, and does not require rigorous research, it also should be verifiable information that you have received from an informed source.

As well, the Guide Note should be totally free of bias. Avoid giving your own opinion of a subject and instead stick to "just the facts." This is true of pages that are politically or culturally charged, but extends to all other kinds of pages, too, even on topics that are generally considered inoffensive. For example, a page on cinnamon buns should not say "Cinnamon buns are a delicious treat for the whole family" or "Cinnamon buns are my favorite food." This may very well be true, but Mahalo Guide Notes should be more like an encyclopedia entry, free of personal perspective and limited to factual information about the subject.

The 2nd paragraph of a guide note consists of the latest news available on the topic, be sure to include a citation for the news event. When you update your page with newer news, move the older news down below the fast facts. Be sure to return to your page and update the news paragraph when breaking news happens. If news breaking news is unlikely periodically challenge yourself to find a news item to use for an update.

The Fast Facts we'd most like to include on the page are featured on that page's template. If any of the facts do not apply to your page, it's okay to click the "n/a" button to the right of that box and move on to the next fact. Please do not invent or guess at facts; you will be asked to provide a link as a citation, to indicate where you got your information.

If you want to continue to add facts beyond the suggestions Mahalo has made, click the "Add a Fact" button and continue. If your fact does not need a title as well as the information (such as "Spouse: Michelle Obama"), just type the complete fact in the box marked "Fact Value."

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the Guide Note section of your page, to learn more about the guide note, including how to add a citation, visit How To Write A Guide Note

When you first arrive at your page to begin work, you will see a variety of buttons next to every section heading and link. This is known as the "toolbar," and these buttons will allow you to make edits and changes to the content of your page. In particular, they allow you to rearrange the order of the page's links and sections to feature the most important and relevant information on your chosen topic.

This legend describes how all the buttons work:

'''THUMBTACK''': Pins your section or link where it is, and won't let anyone else move it around. Use this when something is very important and needs to be seen first
'''HAND''': Hold down the "hand" icon and it lets you drag that section anywhere you want on the page, or drag that link anywhere you want in its section. When you've got it placed where you want it, just drop it in and move on
'''ARROW UP''': Move the link or section up one spot
'''ARROW DOWN''': Move the link or section down one spot
'''DOUBLE UP''': Move the link or section to the very top
'''DOUBLE DOWN''': Move the link or section to the very bottom
'''7''': Move the link into the Top 7
'''X''': Remove the link or section from the page<

When entering Edit View, the first thing you will see is the "Page Builder" box on the upper-right-hand corner of the page.

Notice the button marked:

'''User View''': This will toggle off the 'Edit View' so you can see the page as it would look to a regular Mahalo user

The Page Builder also includes the '''Add Section''' feature: two drop-down menus that you will need to use when building your page.

The "to Guide Note" menu lets you drop a new section into your Guide Note column. A "Text" section will simply be a text box in which you can write a few original sentences. A "List" section will allow you to list items numerically or just with bullet points. Choosing "Facts" will add or replace a Fast Facts section. Choosing "Sponsored Links" will place a Google AdSense box in that spot.

The "to Links" menu lists all the different kinds of information you can add to the body of your page. More on this in the next section.

Finally, the three links at the bottom will take you to helpful instructional pages: How Mahalo Works, How to Build a Mahalo Page and How to Market a Mahalo Page.

In your page builder, you will find a "Google Search" option. This section will place on your Mahalo page the top 10 Google Search results for your Topic. To curate this section you want check each link to make sure that the links are suitable and spam free for you page. Be sure to "pin" the absolute essential links for your topic within this section so that they do not get buried.

You can refine your results in the Images section by clicking "Edit" and then changing the "Search Term" to something more specific. If your page is on How to Grow Tomatoes, you may want to just do an image search for "tomatoes" to get the best results.

This tool will search Flickr and Google Images for the topic of your page and then produce all relevant results. Bear in mind that visitors to Mahalo, seeing the "User View," will only see the first 17 results, while you as an editor will have access to many more. The first picture in the Images section will become the "avatar" for this page across Mahalo, so make sure it's the best one that's most representative of your topic, "pin" the best photo in the first spot so it doesn't ever get moved.

You can refine your results in the Images section by clicking "Edit" and then changing the "Search Term" to something more specific. If your page is on How to Grow Tomatoes, you may want to just do an image search for "tomatoes" to get the best results.

Also learn about Creative Commons Image Search to find the best free images to use for your page.

This tool performs a search for videos on YouTube related to your topic. You can also refine the video search by clicking "Edit" and then changing the "Search Term" to something more specific.

This will add a targeted news search based on the topic of your page. News articles will automatically be pulled in by Mahalo and listed in order of relevance. No maintenance is needed for this section, however you can refine the search by clicking the "edit" button in the section title.

This tool allows you to embed a video, image or song onto the Mahalo page, and also includes a comment section where visitors can interact and discuss the embedded material. The "Section Title" should clearly identify what it is you're embedding. Then "Description Text" should offer some quick bits of info about the item -- who made it, where it came from, its significance to the overall page, etc. (NOTE: Only videos from Hulu and YouTube can be entered as a Featured Object. To include them, simply paste the URL of the video - not the embed code - in to the Featured Object box).

Currently there are several "shopping" sections available within the Page Builder. You can have a eBay, Amazon.com, Shopzilla or Google Products section. It is recommended that you only use one or two of these sections as we don't want to flood pages with products. Find the section that offers the best options for you.

This tool performs a search on Twitter for the latest tweets related to the topic of your page. no maintenance is needed as this feed will update every time somebody visits your page, however you can refine your search if the tweets showing up are hardly related to your topic.

This section pulls in the most related questions from Mahalo Answers. If the questions that appear are not related, fear not, as it merely means no related questions have been asked yet. Feel free to use the question box from the section and type in some questions even yourself might have about the topic. Those questions will appear on Mahalo Answers and will possibly draw people to your topic page.

You can choose to include any of the following sections from the "to Links" drop-down menu in the Page Builder:

Text: This will allow you to just write some information on the page. It will mostly be used on more content-heavy pages like How To's or Video Game Walkthroughs.

List: This will add a numbered or bulleted list to your page. These will often be useful as timelines, if you want to list, for example, biographical information on a historical figure, a director's complete filmography or all the albums released by a band.

Blogs: This will pull in a Mahalo blog search on the topic of your page.

Map: This will import a map from Google Maps. If the title of your page is a location, the map will automatically display that location. If you want to specify a location for your map that's different from the title of the page, click "Edit" and enter the name under the "Location" box. You should also include a brief description of the area depicted in the map and indicate why you have placed it on the page.

Stock Quotes: If you are making a page about a company, you may want to include a stock quote in your links. Choosing a stock quote section will automatically pull in financial information for a company of your choice. To enter an appropriate stock symbol, click the "Edit" button and then enter it into the appropriate box. The stock ticker should display automatically.

The Mahalo Top 7: This adds a Top 7 to your page. You can then fill in the Top 7 with the best links from the page by clicking the "7" button in blue next to each link. A Top 7 is not needed on your page...Only include it if you have 5 or more VERY high quality links that you consider essential to have at the very top of the page.

Here are the common pieces of wiki code you can use to customize text on your pages:

DOUBLE BRACKETS

To make a word or phrase into an internal link to another Mahalo page, put double brackets around it.

[[Mahalo]] is an Internet [[search engine]] will look like this:

Mahalo is an Internet search engine

Put double brackets around all proper nouns, years, dates and any other terms you think would make an interesting Mahalo search.

To refer to a term differently in the text than what the page is called, you can use a pipe to separate the term, placing the page title first and the text second like this: [[New York State|NY]] will look like this: NY and inlink to the page titled New York State.

BOLD AND ITALICS

To use italics, put two apostrophes on either side of the word or phrase you want italicized. Here is an example:

''The Great Gatsby'' will look like this: The Great Gatsby

To use boldface, put three apostrophes on either side of the word or phrase you want bolded. Here is an example:

'''The Great Gatsby''' will look like this: The Great Gatsby

CITATIONS IN TEXT

If you want to cite a fact you are writing in a text section of a Mahalo page (as opposed to a Fast Facts section), you can use <ref> to designate a link. Take a look at this sentence as an example.

[[Barack Obama]] is the 44th President of the [[United States]].<ref>http://www.mahalo.com/barack-obama</ref>

Now here's how that would look on a Mahalo page:

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.http://www.mahalo.com/barack-obama

Click that footnote number and it will take you to the bottom of the page, where your URL is now listed as a "reference."

All How To pages must be referenced and sourced. A citation is needed whenever you:

1. Use a quote
2. State a statistical fact
3. Paraphrase information from another source
4. Utilize someone else's opinions and interpretations
5. Are making a medical, legal, or financial claim

Citations are not needed when you:

1. Are stating "common knowledge." A general rule of thumb is, if you are not sure whether something is common knowledge or not, it probably isn't. Common knowledge statements are claims that are generally accepted and known in a given community.http://www.uta.fi/FAST/PK6/REF/commknow.html
2. Are giving your own interpretations. In general, subjective and first person writing is not condoned on Mahalo. However, the nature of How To's demands that writers interpret information and present it in their own voice. Within reason, then, interpretive statements are allowed—but should be tempered with sourced opinion.

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