Help:Contents
A wiki is basically a website you can edit.
To edit a page, click the edit tab at the top, edit the material in the input box then click the Save page button at the bottom.
Create a user account so we can keep track of who is doing what.
How to edit
Wiki pages are mostly plain text with a few basic formatting characters. If you're nervous about formatting, just type plain text and leave a blank line to separate paragraphs.
Read this tutorial: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing
In about 2 pages it explains the basic concepts & formatting characters. It also has loads of good links you can come back to later when you want to know more.
Many types of pages (e.g. specific Domains, specific Committees) have templates you can copy/paste when creating new pages.
If you want a safe place to practice editing, feel free to play in the Sandbox page.
How to write
Writing a web page is different than writing a document.
These links provide some useful insight.
Text Conventions
<These are just provisional and should be discussed>
Use bold text to emphasize topics.
Use <italic text in angle brackets> for instructions to editors, i.e. text that should be replaced and explains what goes there, such as in a template
Use <bold italic text in angle brackets> when adding in-line comments about the contents of a page.
How to use MediaWiki
The links that are always available on the left side and across the top of the page provide a lot of useful features.
Recent Changes / History
The Recent Changes link in the navigation box takes you to the Recent Changes page. Every edit to any wiki page is listed from newest to oldest. Clicking on the (diff) link lets you see what the edit changed. Clicking on the page link itself lets you see that version. Clicking on the (hist) link lets you see the history of changes to that page.
You can also see past versions from the History tab on each page.
Watch / Watchlist
The My watchlist link at the top is a filtered list that only shows changes to pages you have flagged by clicking the Watch tab at the top of each page.
Search
The search box on the left lets you do keyword searches on the site contents. You can change the scope of the search in your preferences.
Printable Version
The Printable Version link on the left generates a version of the current page more suitable for printing from your browser.
Discussions
Each page has a Discussion tab at the top. If you feel it useful/necessary, explain the purpose of the page or the rationale of it's structure here.
If you are about to make a major change to a page, check the Discussion page to make sure you aren't misunderstanding the page. If you are going ahead with a major change, consider documenting your rationale.
User Page
Click on a user name (yours appears up at the top, others appear on history pages, etc) to get to their personal page. Also at the top is a my talk link which takes you to the Discussion page associated with your user page. Other users can leave you messages there. You will be automatically notified when you log in if someone has updated your discussion/talk page.
Consider this template when creating your User Page.
Special Pages
<Need to explain the really handy pages under Special Pages>
Categories
You can categorize pages by adding one or more category tags to the text. Adding a tag creates a link at the bottom of the article which take you to the list of all pages in that category, which makes it easy to browse related articles.
For example, add one of these to the bottom of a page:
[[Category:Actor]] [[Category:Agenda]] [[Category:Minutes]] [[Category:Profiles]] [[Category:Templates]]
In addtion, you can categorize each page based on its domain abbreviation:
[[Category:PCD]]
Add as many tags as you like, so your page will be found in as many appropriate category listings as makes sense.
Finally, you may want your category sorted differently. The following tag puts your page on the Profiles list, but sorted using the "SortMeHere" tag:
[[Category:Profiles | SortMeHere]]
Tips & Tricks
Quasi-Back Button
If you have done several edits, when you use the browser "Back" button you will have to go back many times to get to the page you came from.
As an alternative that takes two clicks, you can click on "What links here" in the Toolbox on the left side of the Wiki page. The page you came from will be listed there an you can click on it.
Text Size
To change the font size from the normal size to larger or smaller use:
- <big> text </big>
- <small> text </small>
Text Color
To change the color of the font being displayed use:
- <font color=red> text </font>
Line Formatting
To force a hard Carriage-Return/Line-feed in the displayed document, either leave a blank line, or use:
- <br />
To center a text line, or all text between start HTML Tag and end HTML tag, use:
- <center>text</center>
Quoting Text
To quote text without applying the wiki formatting rules use:
- <nowiki> text </nowiki>
Within a nowiki section, only HTML-quoting of special characters (<>&) will occur--no other formatting rules will be applied.
Embedding Images/Graphics/Documents
First upload the jpg using the Upload File link on the left. Then put a link to the jpg at the place you want the image to appear using the following format:
- [[Image:NameOfYourFile.jpg]]
You can also embed links to files such as:
- [[:Media:NameOfYourFile.doc | link text]]
- Term (bolded term)
- Definition (with indented definition)
is accomplished by:
- ;Term (bolded term):Definition (with indented definition)
Using Templates
There are templates for some typical types of pages. A page often has a link in the See Also section to the template it was created from.
To use the template, click it's link, click "Edit", and select and copy all the text in the edit window. Then go to your new page, and paste the template text into the edit window.
Table of Contents
All pages with more than two headers include a Table of Contents at the top of the page with each of the section headers included as links.
To move the TOC, insert the text __TOC__ at the point in the page where you would like it to appear.
To remove the TOC, insert the text __NOTOC__ at the start of the page.
Combined Pages
To combine several existing pages into a single meta page when it makes sense to do so for viewing or printing, create a new page with the following syntax:
- ==Optional Heading==
- {{:Page page1}}
- {{:Page page2}}
- and so on
Printing Pages
To get a printable page with BIG HEADERS:
- click on Printable View in the toolbox on the left
- print from the browser.
To get a document formatted for paper:
- click on Printable View in the toolbox on the left
- select and copy all the text in the Printable View
- open an empty Microsoft Word document
- paste the text into the Word document
- File->Page Setup-> reset the margins
- Tools->Templates and Add-ins
- <still need to explain how to import/overwrite the appropriate paragraph styles>
- print from Word
Spellchecking
There are client side spell checkers that will check what you edit:
- Google Toolbar for Explorer (http://toolbar.google.com/)
- ieSpell for Explorer (http://www.iespell.com/)
- Spellbound for Firefox (http://wiki.ehow.com/Install-a-Spell-Checker-Into-Firefox)
Task Lists
The MediaWikiTasks plugin supports managing task lists.
Timelines
The EasyTimelines plugin supports displaying annotated timelines.
Converting Pages to HTML Files
mw2html is a tool for doing just this. Right click on this link and "Save Target as.." mw2html.py
It can be run with a Python binary package.
You will also need to get the htmldata module. Do a "Save Target As..." on the newest version link on that page. I don't remember off-hand how I got it to compile.
Once it's ready, try: "mw2html.py http://172.16.16.134/wiki/ out -f"
Note: you may have a problem becausee it doesn't seem to use the login cookie cached for the browser so mw2html.py is an anonymous user so it only gets logon pages for pages that anonymous users don't have permission to view.
PDF Export
Combining articles into a single PDF for printing. It needs htmldoc (open source utility) to take multiple HTML pages and turn them into a PDF file. All pdf files stored on wiki server's folder called /printouts.
The coding is very simple and works like this: (we'll call this page "Test Print")
Put articles that will appear in sequence in curly braces: {Index_of_Work_Items | Feature_Proposals_Index | Index_of_Trend_Reports}
and put articles to combine into a single set of curly braces separated by the | pipe symbol. {Index_of_Work_Items | Feature_Proposals_Index | Index_of_Trend_Reports} These articles will not have a page break in the PDF file. This is really useful for articles that are short and related, such as a function list. Then add a link to this page:
Now when a user browses to this page on your site and clicks the above link, the page will re-output through the special PrintArticles.php file instead of index.php. The page will be changed from looking like this:
{Index_of_Work_Items | Feature_Proposals_Index | Index_of_Trend_Reports}
Print these articles
to this:
{Index_of_Work_Items | Feature_Proposals_Index | Index_of_Trend_Reports}
Print these articles
Creating: (Index_of_Work_Items)
Creating: (Feature_Proposals_Index)
Creating: (Index_of_Trend_Reports)
Known Problems:
- HTMLDOC can import images when running from command line but not reliable when spawn from wiki.
- Quotes print out as: a with an accent
- Funky caching issues
See Also
The IHE Wiki is built on MediaWiki software. The MediaWiki User's Guide is an excellent reference.
MediaWiki and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia provide more information and examples of using MediaWiki.
Wiki Introduction provides a short video outlining the use of Wiki's for collaboration
Configuration settings list explains the MediaWiki config variables.
MediaWiki FAQ answers most questions about managing and using MediaWiki.