How to use our Wiki

Getting Started

A wiki is “a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily… The term wiki is a shortened form of ‘wiki wiki’ which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something ‘quick’ or ‘fast’ (Hawaiian dictionary)” (Wikipedia).

For example, a “cookbook wiki” would be a website where you could easily add your own recipes, edit existing recipes, and help organize the recipes using categories. You’d do all of this with simple markup called wiki syntax (we’ll get to that shortly). Together you and the community would maintain this online recipe collection to help bring more deliciousness to everyone’s meals.

Help Topics

Creating an Article Entry
Categorizing an Article Entry
Link to a Category Page
Creating a Link with Alternate Display Text
Adding a file or image

Creating an Article Entry

Creating an article in a wiki is as simple as finding something that doesn’t exist. A wiki assumes that whenever someone searches for an article and no results are found or clicks on a link to an article that doesn’t exist, that someone will want to create that information for the community.

To create an entry, simply type the title you would like the entry to have in the “Create an Article” textfield just about the wiki menu. Select and click the “Create” button. If an entry with the title you’ve selected exists, the system will return that entry to you. If not, you will have the option to create the entry be selecting the “Edit” button about the entry title you have just enter.

Categorizing an Article Entry

Assigning an article to a category is easily accomplished with wiki syntax. For example, to add your Peanut Butter Sandwich to the Sandwiches category you would click on the edit link to enter the article’s edit mode and add the following anywhere in the article:

This would automatically assign the article to the Sandwiches category. If the category doesn’t exist, the wiki will create it automatically.

To add multiple categories just add an additional category like so:

This would assign the article to the Sandwiches and Peanut Butter categories.

Finally, you can add sub-categories. For example, let’s say you want to create a “breakfast” sub-category for the main (also called “parent") Sandwiches category. The following would do that:

Now the article is assigned to the Sandwiches parent category and the Breakfast sub-category.

Link to a Category Page

This will create a link to the category page (notice colon at the beginning) that will display all the articles in the specified categories. This does not create a category.

Creating a Link with Alternate Display Text

You can specify different text to display as the link for article, Category, Namespace, and File links by separating the link from the display text with a pipe ("|") symbol.

This creates a link to a wiki page with the specified title, and uses the display text for the link.

Adding a File or Image

To add a file or image to a wiki entry you must first upload the item to our wiki’s file directory.

1. Select “File Upload” from the wiki menu.
2. Follow each step of the “File Upload” section and submit.

Once added to our directory, the file will be available for you to include by selecting it from either the “Recent Uploads” list from the “Article Edit” section, or by using the tags provided in the File entry.