Wiki Course/ Basic Introduction Hand Out

What is a Wiki?

• a technology for collaborative creation of internet and intranet pages

• Wiki-Wiki is hawaii and means fast

Principles

• Fast - fast editing, communicating and easy to learn

• Open - everybody may read and edit everything

• Uncomplicated - everything works in a standard browser

• Easy - no HTML knowledge necessary, simply formatted text

• Simple - Content over Form (content counts, not the super-pretty appearance)

• Secure - every change is archived, nothing gets lost

• Interlinked - Links between pages are easy to make

• Flexible

• • Personal Information Management, Knowledgebases, Brainstorming

  • Collaboration, Coordination and Communication platform

  • Creating documentation and slide shows

  • etc...

For details see Help For Beginners.

The First Steps

• Help with problems or questions: Help Contents () and Help Miscellaneous/ Frequently Asked Questions

• User Preferences

• • Name (appears on Recent Changes)

  • Email address for subscribing to page change emails and retrieving a lost login/password

  • Personal preferences

  • Link with User-ID ( in any case, put a bookmark on that)

• Structure of pages

• • Navigation: Quicklinks, Icons link to system actions (Help On Navigation)

  • "Recently visited pages" (see User Preferences)

  • Content

  • Quick search and additional actions (Help On Actions)

Details see Help For Beginners.

How do I navigate?

Searching and Navigation:

• Backlinks (click on title)

• Icons at top right (Help On Navigation)

• Title search and full text search at bottom of page

Good places to start your Wiki exploration:

• Wiki Sand Box: Sandbox page to play around and experiment with

• Recent Changes: What has changed recently?

• Site Navigation: A list of the different indices of the Wiki

• Find Page: Searching the Wiki by various methods

• Title Index: A list of all pages in the Wiki

• Word Index: A list of all words in page titles (i.e. a list of keywords/concepts in the Wiki)

Using the Editor

To edit a page, just click on or on the link "EditText" at the end of the page. A form will appear enabling you to change text and save it again. A backup copy of the previous page's content is made each time.

You can check the appearance of the page without saving it by using the preview function - without creating an entry on Recent Changes; additionally there will be an intermediate save of the page content, if you have created a homepage ( is visible).

After editing pages, please leave the edit form by "Save Changes" since otherwise your edits will be lost!

For details see Help On Editing.

Tips on the Editor

"Check spelling" examines the text for unknown words.

Within the editor, the usual hotkeys work:

If you discover an interesting format somewhere, just go to the editor to find out how it was done.

In User Preferences, you can set up the editor to open when you double click a page.

You can subscribe to pages to get a mail on every change of that page. Just click on the envelope at top right of the page.

Text Markup and Links

To add special formatting to text, just enclose it within markup. There are special notations which are automatically recognized as internal or external links or as embedded pictures.

Input	Display
''italic'' and '''bold''' and __underlined__	italic and bold and underlined
`typewriter`	typewriter
^super^script and ,,sub,,script	superscript and subscript
PageReference WikiSandBox	Page Reference Wiki Sand Box
MoinMoin:HelpContents	HelpContents (Inter Wiki-Link)
http://www.web.de/	http://www.web.de/
http://www.pythonwiki.de/wiki/img/moinmoin.gif
:)  B)  :))  ;)  :D  :(  :-?  ;))	;)) (Smileys)
/!\  <!>  (!)  (./)  {OK}  {X}  {i}	(Marks)
{1}  {2}  {3}  {de}  {en}	(Priorities and flags)

For details see Help On Formatting, Help On Linking and Help On Smileys.

Headlines and Paragraphs

Headlines are placed on a line of their own and surrounded by one to five equal signs denoting the level of the headline. The headline is in between the equal signs, separated by a space. Example:
== Second Level ==

A common error is to insert an additional blank after the ending equal signs!

Paragraphs are lines separated by empty lines or other block structures. This means those lines which directly follow each other belong to one paragraph.

First Line
...
Last Line

For better visual separation, horizontal lines can be generated by using four dashes.

For details see Help On Headlines and Help On Rules.

Lists

item list

• first level

• • second Level

  • second item

  • indented text without bullet

• first level again

enumerated list

1. first item

2. second item (automatically enumerated)

Glossary

Term

Explanation

For details see Help On Lists.

Tables

Tables appear if you separate the content of the columns by  ||. All fields of the same row must be also on the same line in the editor.

Markup:

||<rowbgcolor="#FFFFE0"> '''Column 1'''  |||| '''Column 2 & 3''' ||
||<)> 1  ||<:> 2 ||<(> 3 ||

Display:

For details see Help On Tables.

Macros

• Macros allow dynamic (computed) content to be inserted into pages.

• A macro is called by "[[MacroName(parameters)]]".

• The parameters are optional, depending on the macro.

• The most important macros:

• • TableOfContents - show a local table of contents

  • Anchor - defines a link target line

  • FootNote - generates a footnote¹

  • PageList - generates lists of pages with titles matching a pattern

For details see Help On Macros.

Actions

Actions operate either on a single page or on the whole Wiki.

• AttachFile: Attach files to a page (Help On Actions/ Attach File)

• DeletePage: Delete a page (after a security question)

• LikePages: Lists pages with similar title

• LocalSiteMap: List of all pages that are referred to, up to a maximum of 4 levels

• SpellCheck: Call check spelling for the current page (Help On Spell Check)

For details see Help On Actions.

Wikiquette - how do I behave correctly?

Cooperative Editing

Basic principle: Anybody logged in can edit anything.

Exceptions:

• If you want to edit a page without being disturbed, just write a note to that effect at the top of the page and save that change first.

• If two people edit a page simultaneously, the first can save normally, but the second will get a warning and should follow the directions to merge their changes with the already saved data.

• Personal Homepages: normally only changed by their owner, but you may append messages at the end of the page

In general, do follow any hints given on a page, there is generally no enforced limit, but you should not blindly ignore other people's wishes.

Organisation and Structure

• Naming

• • don't create arbitrary wikinames (OracleDatabase, not OraCle)

  • common prefixes (topical correlation)

  • common postfixes (same page type, e.g. ...Index)

• Index pages

• Categories (see Category Category)

• Templates

• /SubPages (allow shorter links, automatic correlation: Help On Editing/ Sub Pages)

• Follow the guidance of the Wiki used about how to name pages etc.

Exercises

For the exercises we use your own Wiki-homepage which is usually based on a Wiki Name FirstnameLastname:

• Configure your User Preferences.

• create and change your homepage (normally FirstnameLastname)

• view the changes in the Recent Changes.

• try the icons

• unrestrained clicking

• ask, ask, ask.

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