Wiki Usage Notes
There are many good reasons to set up a wiki; to allow many people to write in the same space about the same subject, with document version history automatically tracked and the results of edits displaying instantly are a couple of compelling reasons. The other positive reason is that writing on a wiki does not require understanding of HTML, or potentially complex layout and formatting systems such as CSS.
Please Note: This document is written assuming a basic familiarity with WikiText on the part of the reader.
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Creating a Wiki Page
For some the fun part of a wiki is merely reading what others write. For most though, it is as much fun or more to create and edit pages. This section of this page is intended to provide some helpful tips or just some conversation pieces on the topic.
Starting New Pages: Why Searching is Good
There are many ways to trick the Wiki engine into generating the "create this page" prompt, but in my experience, I find typing the name of the proposed new page into the Special:Search box is the best method.
The obvious advantage is that if someone has started a page along similar lines to the proposed new page, one can find out and contribute to the existing page before running too far down our own avenue, but if the search comes up blank, the option to create a new page will be present on the search results screen to be clicked on.
To Edit or to Word Process
One of the strengths of a wiki is that it is accessible and editable via the same medium, and that medium is generally the Internet. Put another way, if you can see it you can create or edit on it. While this is the cool part of a wiki, it is not always recommended. If one wishes to keep offline backups of content or to check spelling interactively, it is sometimes better to write in a word processor and copy/paste into the wiki.
Preview for the Greater Good
Sometimes editing and saving on a wiki is almost too easy. When a document is saved on a wiki, a version tracking entry for the page is automatically generated. This affords administrators and privileged users of the wiki the ability to roll back to older versions should something go awry, and allows everyone to see differential versions of pages and other cool things.
However, if one clicks save compulsively after every minor edit, this can become cumbersome for the Wiki engine, and while minor edits can be filtered out from the viewers point of view, that data is still stored somewhere.
So in my opinion, it is better to use the preview button to see incremental changes made as a document is being edited, and to only save at key points or milestones in the document's creation process, such as when a new major section has been written.
Formatting a Wiki Page
While it is true then that one can simply type into the edit box and hit Save, it is also true that a little understanding of WikiText - the language of the Wiki - can aid in producing complex looking documents, with a minimum of technical input.
Tables of Contents and Section Header Usage
One of the simplest things to do on a Wiki page is to create the "Table of Contents" seen at the top of most wiki pages. It's simple because the wiki software does it for you, if you give it a little hint.
The key to this hint is Section Headings, which are created by enclosing a short line of text between equals' signs. The real trick is that different levels of headings can be created by using different numbers of equals' signs and this in turn helps the wiki software to create a nicely formatted table of contents.
My personal style when creating pages on this wiki is to use two equals' signs to create headings for major sections in my article, and three equals' signs to denote a subsection of that major section.
In this way, as one moves linearly down the editing page, a structure of headings will appear; major headings wrapped in pairs of two equals' signs with groups of related headings below wrapped in pairs of three equals' signs, until a new major heading appears, again wrapped in pairs of two equals' signs, and the whole structure begins again. This kind of structuring helps the wiki create a logically formatted contents table, and tends to create easy to follow pages with easy to reference subsections.
Linking to Subsections of Pages
If a page on the wiki is laid out using the section header method described above, it becomes very easy to reference a particular section of the page; one only needs to create a Wiki Link constructed of the page name followed by a hash or pound sign ("#") and then the section name. A formal title for the link can then be applied by typing a vertical bar or pipe symbol ("|") and then the description to be displayed.
For example, to link to the page formatting section above, the WikiLink for this looks like this: [[Usage Notes#Formatting a Wiki Page|page formatting section above]].
