What is a Wiki?

• a technology for collaborative creation of internet and intranet pages

• Wiki-Wiki is hawaiian 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 - grows with the community

To learn more read about the first WikiWikiWeb.

The First Steps

• Register and Login

• UserPreferences

  • Name (appears on ChangeLog)

  • Email address for subscribing to page change notify, and retrieving a lost login/password
  • Personal preferences

  • Create Homepage, click on your name in User menu

• Structure of pages
  • Navigation and Page menu: Quicklinks and Actions
  • User menu with "Recently viewed"
  • Page content

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnNavigation

How do I navigate?

Basic Navigation:

• The Navigation menu provide links to some main pages
• Links to other pages are displayed as blue underlined text.

Some places to start your Wiki exploration:

• WikiSandBox: Sandbox page to play around and experiment with

• RecentChanges: What has changed recently?

• SiteNavigation: A list of the different indices of the Wiki

• FindPage: Searching the wikiMA by various methods

• TitleIndex: A list of all pages in the Wiki

• WordIndex: A list of all words in page titles

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnNavigation

Using the Editor

wikiMA supports editing both via text-based and graphical user interface.

• To edit a page, just click on Edit(Text) or Edit(GUI) in the Page menu.

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 actual appearance of the page without saving, by using the "preview" function - without creating an entry in ChangeLog.

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

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnTextEditor and WikiHelp/HelpOnGuiEditor

Tips on the Editor

• "Check spelling" examines the text for unknown words.

• "Preview" will show how the page will be displayed.
  

Use the preview also when using the GUI editor. It is a WYSIWYM (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouMean - not a WhatYouGet)

• Within the editor, the usual hotkeys work:

  Undo: CTRL+Z	Redo: CTRL+Y
  Copy: CTRL+C	Paste: CTRL+V
  Home: CTRL+Home	End: CTRL+End

If you discover an interesting format somewhere, just use the "Raw Text" action to find out how it was done. (More Actions: RawText)

In your UserPreferences, 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.

Text Markup and Links

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

CHANNEL 1 AT 100 

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnTextEditor

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 Headline ==

Second Level Headline

• 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.

Preformatted text (e.g. a copy of an email) should be placed inside three curly braces {{{ ... }}} to preserve linebreaks:

First Line
...
Last Line

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnTextEditor

Lists

Use space and an asteric (*) for bulleted list, space and 1. for enumerating. Space alone indents.

• first level
  • second level
  • second item

    • indented text without bullet

• first level again

1. first level
   1. second level
   2. second item (automatically enumerated)
2. first level again (automatically enumerated)

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnTextEditor.

Tables

Tables are created 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:

• ||<tableclass="border3"rowbgcolor="#FFFFE0"> Col 1 |||| Col 2 & 3 ||
  ||<)> 1  ||<:> 2 ||<(> 3 ||

Display:

• Col 1	Col 2 & 3
  1	2	3

• Use tables to position text or images on the page:

Markup:

• ||<tableclass="tcenter">http://www.wikima.net/w/common/NSP_front.jpg||

Display:

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnTables.

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.
• Some important macros:

  • BR - Inserts a hard linebreak

  • TableOfContents - show a local table of contents

  • Anchor - defines a link target line

  • FootNote - generates a footnote¹

  • Include - Inserts the content of another page

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

For details see WikiHelp/HelpOnMacros.

Actions

Actions operate either on a single page or on the whole Wiki. Most actions are listed in the Page menu

• Edit (Text) and Edit (GUI) allows you to edit the page

• Attachments, allows to add and get attachments of the page

• Raw Text, shows the source code of the current page

• Check Spelling, invokes spelling checker

• Like Pages, prints a list of pages with titles similar to this page

• Local Site Map, prints a list of pages that are referred from this page

For details and full list see WikiHelp/HelpOnNavigation.

Creating new Pages

New pages are created by simply adding a new WikiName to an existing page and clicking on it after saving the existing page.

Some pages also has a textfield and button to automatically create a related page.

When creating a new page you may get a list of template to base your page from. If you are not sure which template to use, select the Standard Template.

Next to the list of templates you will also find a list of existing pages with a similar name. You should always check this list because someone else might have already started a page about the same subject but named it slightly differently.

For details see WikiGuidelines and WikiName.

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.

• System and main pages that forms the structure of this site may only be edited by approved users. These pages will display Immutable Page rahter than the Edit link.

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.

Before contributing please read the DisclaimerPage and WikiGuidelines

Organisation and Structure

• Naming

  • don't create arbitrary wikinames (ToolsMenu, not TooLs)

  • common prefixes (topical correlation e.g. EffectTutorial, EffectMarket)

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

• Language - please use English language only
• Categories (select from "Add to"-field below editorform)
• Templates (may control both access and layout)

• /SubPages (allow shorter links, automatic correlation: e.g. WikiHelp/HelpOnTextEditor)

Please read the WikiGuidelines before contributing

Exercises

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

• Configure your UserPreferences.

• Create and change your homepage (normally FirstnameLastname)

  • (click on your name in the User menu, and select HomepageTemplate)

• View the changes in the hangeLog.

• Add some WikiNames to your page to test linking

• Unrestrained clicking
• Unrestrained clicking