Help
From WildWiki
Changing Your Password
To change your password, login (with the link in the top right corner, or see the instructions below) and then click the preferences link (also near the top right corner of the screen).
Editing Wiki Pages
By far, the best way to learn to edit pages is to modify or cut and paste examples from already-existing wiki pages. So, click the edit button on this page and see how it's done for yourself. If you want to try something out, play around in the Sandbox!
At the same time, commonly understood idioms and editing procedures will help the wiki stay cohesive. To that end, the tips below prove useful reading.
What is a Wiki?
"[A] wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. [A] wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
"[A] wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
"Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users." (from http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki)
Opening a Page for Editing
To edit a page, the first thing you need to do is login to the wiki.
Logging In
- 1. Click the Create an account or login link at the top right of the screen.
- 2. Enter your user name and password and click Log in. If you don't have a user name and password yet, e-mail Tom (ferreto).
Editing
- 1. Navigate to the page you want to edit and then click the edit button at the top of the screen.
- 2. Edit the page in the provided text box, enter a summary of the changes you made, click Show preview, and then, if everything looks okay in the preview, click Save page.
Basic Editing Techniques
You can make a web page just by typing plain text, without knowing any HTML or using any of the formatting capabilities of MediaWiki. A few key tips, however, will help you organize your pages and design them in the same look and feel as the rest of the wiki. For more extensive editing help, check out the MediaWiki Users' Guide.
Use MediaWiki's hierarchical headers.
These control the organization that you see, for example, on this page. Each section has its own level that indicates where and under what it falls on the page. In addition, a table of contents is generated automatically at the top of the page, if it is long enough to make one useful. To use MediaWiki's headers, simply surround your header with some number of = signs, like so:
=Main page header= Some plain text. ==Subsection 1== Some plain text. ===Sub-subsection 1=== Some plain text. ==Subsection 2== Some plain text.
This will give you a page that looks like this:
Hit return or enter twice between paragraphs.
If you put only one carriage return between paragraphs, MediaWiki will merge them together.
Use MediaWiki's linking mechanism to link between pages.
Links are good; the more the better (to a point). MediaWiki uses two linking methods, (a) to internal pages and (b) to external pages. Internal pages are those hosted by MediaWiki itself only, and external pages are all other pages (e.g., a web site you found with information about hiking in the Ouachitas).
To link to internal pages, surround a page name with double brackets, for example:
[[Main Page]]
will provide a link to the Main Page. If you want to customize the text of a link so that it reads better within a sentence, follow the link name with a | and the custom text, like so:
For more information, see [[WildWiki:About|About the Wilderness Wiki]].
This link will appear like so:
For more information, see About the Wilderness Wiki.
To link to external pages, use one bracket instead of two and follow the link with the link text that you want to show on the page. For example:
[http://www.fs.fed.us/oonf/ouachita.htm Ouachita National Forest]
will appear as:
Creating new pages.
To create a new page, just create a link to it (see above) as if it existed. After saving the page with the new link, click it (it will appear in red to indicate that no page yet exists by that name) and you will be transported to the editing window for that page.
Organize pages hierarchically.
This point is of crucial importance. Say, for example, that you're planning a backpacking trip over spring break. So, you create a new page called "Spring Break Backpacking." That's all well and good. Now, say you want to create a new page for the gear list for that trip. The natural thing to do would be to create a link from the "Spring Break Backpacking" page titled "Gear List." Now, this makes perfect sense if you only look at the gear list from the spring break backpacking page, but what if, for example, another person were to do the same thing for a canoeing trip? At this point, the page named "Gear List" page becomes ambiguous. What trip does it correspond to? How can multiple trips each have their own gear list, without conflicting with each other?
When you create new pages, you can use the colon character (":") to show hierarchy in page names. For example, instead of titling the link to the gear list simply like so:
[[Gear List]]
title it like so:
[[Spring Break Backpacking: Gear List|Gear List]]
Let's unpack this link. Inside the double brackets there are two components separated by a vertical bar ('|'). The first of these components, "Spring Break Backpacking: Gear List," is the name of the page you want to link to. The second component, "Gear List," is the text that will appear on the page you're adding this link to. That way, you can accomplish both goals: (a) to keep the wiki organized and avoid proliferation of ambiguous pages, and (b) avoid redundancy on the page you're linking from.
Use MediaWiki's formatting bar.
Basic formatting can be done with the bar above the editing box:
For example, select some text and then click the B to make it bold. After awhile you'll see how MediaWiki formatting works and can type it in directly instead of using the formatting buttons. For example, surround text with 3 ' to make it bold:
'''Bold text'''
Use HTML code within your pages directly.
Most HTML code can be used in MediaWiki pages directly. If the above notes don't give you enough control, learn HTML and use it.
Administering MediaWiki
For help maintaining the wiki, visit the Admin page. To edit the navigation bar, type "mediawiki:sidebar" into the search screen. You can then edit the navigation bar directly.
